📱 Android Home-Screen Widget

The AutoDrive Live Drive Widget is a 4×1 home-screen widget that gives you an at-a-glance view of an active drive without opening the app. It’s the home-screen counterpart to the iPhone’s Lock Screen Live Activity card — same metrics, refreshed once a second while you’re driving.

Adding the widget

1. Long-press an empty area of your home screen and choose Widgets.
2. Scroll to the AutoDrive section and pick AutoDrive Live Drive Widget.
3. Drag it to a 4×1 slot on any home-screen page. The widget snaps to the grid; placement is the standard Android home-screen flow, no AutoDrive-specific configuration step.

You can place more than one instance — e.g. one on your primary home page and one on a folder page — and all of them update simultaneously.

What the widget shows

The widget has two display states, both painted with the AutoDrive brand mark in the header:

• While a drive is in progress — three columns: Speed (mph), Distance (mi), and Elapsed (HH:MM:SS or MM:SS). The header pill flips between DRIVING while you’re moving and FINALIZING while AutoDrive is closing out the trip after you’ve stopped.
• When no drive is in progress — the widget collapses to a MONITORING pill plus the line No drive in progress. This means AutoTrack is armed and ready to detect your next drive.

Tap anywhere on the widget to open AutoDrive at the dashboard — the same entry point the foreground notification uses, so all three Live Drive surfaces (notification, status-bar pill, widget) feel like one experience.

How updates work

The widget is not poll-driven — the system never wakes it on a timer. Instead, AutoDrive pushes a fresh widget payload on every drive-state change plus once per second during an active drive (the same 1 Hz ticker that drives the foreground notification and the Android 16 Live Updates pill). This means:

• While driving, all three surfaces stay in lockstep — the widget never lags the notification.
• When you don’t have the widget on the home screen, AutoDrive doesn’t spend any battery refreshing it — the push call short-circuits before doing any work.
• If your phone is asleep or you’re using a different app, the widget’s last-rendered state stays visible until the next time AutoDrive pushes an update.

Requirements

• AutoDrive for Android, latest version from Google Play.
• AutoTrack enabled (otherwise the foreground service that drives the widget isn’t running, and the widget will show a stale state).
• Standard Android home screen with widget support — works on every supported launcher (Pixel Launcher, One UI Home, Nova, etc.).

Troubleshooting

• Widget shows the wrong state or doesn’t update. Pull down the notification shade and check that the AutoDrive foreground notification is visible. If the notification is missing, AutoTrack isn’t armed — open AutoDrive → Settings and toggle AutoTrack. If the notification is present but the widget hasn’t refreshed, remove the widget and re-add it from the picker.
• Battery optimisation killed the service. On Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Huawei devices, aggressive power saving can suspend the foreground service AutoDrive depends on. Open Settings → Apps → AutoDrive → Battery and set usage to Unrestricted, and remove AutoDrive from any "sleeping apps" list.
• Widget tap doesn’t open AutoDrive. A handful of third-party launchers cache widget intents incorrectly; removing and re-adding the widget rebuilds the tap target.