[freehunter]

I love this about Windows Phone's Live Tiles. I never open my weather app. I hardly ever open the Facebook app. I hardly ever open my stock market app. I just check their Live Tile, and at a glance it tells me exactly what I need to know. It's the biggest thing I miss, by far, when I'm using my Android phone. The information density of Android and iOS doesn't even come close, even with a proper notification center.

I really want Android live tiles. Widgets just aren't comparable.

[mcrittenden]

What do live tiles have that android widgets are missing? Honest question.

[freehunter]

taude thinks similarly to how I do. Live Tiles feel like a part of the ecosystem and there's not a widget available for every app I wish there was on Android. Then you have to factor in that there's just not that much room on the Android home screen, and widgets come in a variety of odd shapes and sizes.

Live Tiles are consistent, with only three square (rectangular) sizes to pick from. The fluid scrolling through them (rather than page by page) makes it feel more spacious. I have an entire home page dedicated to Facebook, for example, because the Facebook widget that shows me updates (and only one update at a time) takes up fully half the screen. The weather widget I use takes an entire line of icons, and the calendar widget takes up two columns by three rows. It's like playing a jigsaw puzzle trying to arrange a useful "live" home screen. Live Tiles are also visually consistent, which Android widgets are not (my Android home screen looks hideous).

A Live Tile is a app shortcut that also acts as a widget by displaying useful information. An Android widget is a widget that can also link to the application. That tiny difference is a huge gap in comparison.

[B-Con]

In short: It's not an inherent or technical difference so much as an ecosystem difference. Win8 developers think about Live Tiles differently than Android developers do about widgets. (Right?)

[fyi80]

The non-discrete page-flipping (so you can scroll one column at a time, instead of a whole screen) is nice. I don't know any Android launcher that can do that.

[crwll]

This one can:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.pierrox.li...

With Lightning Launcher, you can also skip the grid altogether and freely align, scale and even rotate your widgets and zoom in and out in the launcher, if you want. It's very customizable.

[seabee]

The new home screen on the HTC One?

[taude]

Tiles are similar to Android widgets, except they're integrated into dashboard in a more "cohesive" manner. On my droid phone, I optionally have to add a special widget (if there's even one for the app, and I sometimes have to download it extra), set the size it takes up on the dashboard page, etc. On the Win phone, the icon you click to start the app is same one that's showing the live data. It's omnipresent. A subtle difference.

[sp332]

The OS understands twitter and facebook natively. If I message someone on facebook, I see that conversation right in-line with my SMS chats with that contact. So there's just one tile for all my messages.

There is a single "People" tile that shows me all the news from facebook and twitter in a single stream. There is another "Me" tile that shows my notifications about mentions or tags.

I think the most important thing is that tapping these doesn't feel like launching an app. I don't have to "go check facebook" and wait for it to load, and then "go look at twitter," etc. I just tap a tile, and in 4 seconds I have everything in one native-looking interface - it even honors the color scheme I picked for the phone :)

[error54]

I think the Google Now widget does quite a good job. It tells me the weather, if I have a package being delivered, sports scores, and quite a few other things. Granted, I've used Live Tiles and did find them pretty useful and I like the flat UI so I think my ideal experience would be a combination of both Now with Live Tiles.

[freehunter]

If I could get all my apps to work with Google Now, I would love it. However, Facebook, for one, does not update Google Now. Is there a public API so apps can push data to Now?

[error54]

Not yet but I believe it's in the pipes over at Google.

[kbenson]

> Widgets just aren't comparable.

I'm curios, I haven't used Windows Phone, what's not comparable?

[MatthewPhillips]

The live-ness of tiles is overstated, in my opinion, but the concept of tiles is wonderful. Here's an example: you're going on a trip so you pin restaurants that look interesting from Urbanspoon, a map to your meeting location from Maps, and some sites you want to see from their web pages. It turns your home screen into a todo list, which is interesting to me.

[kbenson]

Ah. From that description it sounds like there's not a real difference in what widgets allow apps to do, but there is in how easy it is to add and utilize widgets (with Windows being at one extreme, where all or most app icons are widgets)?

Do you think that's an accurate assessment?

[freehunter]

Yeah, a Live Tile is a widget, but it's a well integrated widget. It's an application shortcut that displays information while still looking like an application shortcut. Widgets are completely separate, visually. Windows Live Tiles don't need to be specifically added, if you add an app shortcut to your start screen it's automatically also a widget that looks visually consistent with the rest of the OS.

Your assessment is not too far off. Live Tiles is a more elegant way of handling widgets.

[MatthewPhillips]

Sort of, I guess the biggest difference is in how you add them. Adding widgets is an intentional thing; you decide you want a weather widget on your screen. A tile is something you discover and decide to keep for later. So you find a restaurant you like, you pin it. You don't say "I want to pin something, let me look through a list of pinnable things and pick one".

[freehunter]

That's one use for Tiles, but not the one I'm referring to. Pinning a map is great, but pinning a weather app makes it continuously update the local weather and forecast right on the app shortcut. Pinning a stock app makes your stock quotes show up right there on the app shortcut. There's many use cases for pinning a Live Tile, and the best part is they're all done using the same mechanism.

[fyi80]

To do something like this on Android, you'd need an API for an app to install a widget. I don't know if that's possible outside of the standard appstore download/install process.

[fyi80]

Widgets could do this on Android, if Widget makers chose to implement that. For example Facebook's widget is your stream.

But most widgets are not very interactive, they are more like app preview snapshots, with a tap to launch the app.

[pmelendez]

taude already explained it but I will add my two cents. With widgets the look depends on the developer, which I found annoying when I had an android since I had to go through several screens just because some widgets where really big.

Live tiles are "free", they are the same icon that you would use to start the app and the look and feel is more uniform and rearrange between them in a more convenient way.

Also you can pin a lot of app specific items. For instance, from the people hub I can pin a tile of the whole app and/or pin specific people, and when you do that the tile itself seems like a different app. In my wife's tile I can see whatever she posted on Facebook or twitter, and also it serves as a shortcut to publish something on the wall, or to call or text her, it's just very convenient!

[wuest]

Is this a limitation of Widgets, or of the status of Widget development, though? It seems to me that there's a LOT of untapped potential when it comes to widgets.

[hammock]

Google Now will get you there. http://www.google.com/landing/now/