With the launch of Android 9 Pie, Google also released the first beta of a feature it announced back at I/O 2018: Digital Wellbeing. As many who have installed it have found, however, it doesn’t add an icon to your home screen or app drawer. Rather, the feature lives entirely in the Pixel’s settings app. Now, there’s an app that can fix that if you want more immediate access…
The app that allows you to do this is called Pixel Shortcuts, and it comes via Chris Lacy, the same developer that made the famed Action Launcher.
Using it is pretty simple. Download it from the Play Store and install it, then open it up, and you’ll be presented with a few options as to how you can access Digital Wellbeing from your home screen. You can permanently add an icon to your app drawer (which can then be added to your home screen, of course), or you can choose to go with a simple widget.
Pixel Shortcuts supports adding both the main Digital Wellbeing app to your home screen and app drawer, as well as the Dashboard within Wellbeing if you want to skip yet another tap.
As a bonus, the app is not just for Digital Wellbeing, although that’s certainly the app that people will use it most for as of now. It can also add a shortcut to your home screen for other apps that don’t have icons by default, like the Pixel Launcher or other launcher apps.
If you’re new to Digital Wellbeing in general, be sure to check out our hands-on. As of this writing, it’s only available for Pixel owners. As Lacy notes in the app description, Pixel Shortcuts isn’t going to magically make your non-Pixel phone compatible with the Wellbeing beta.
As you might expect, the app is available on the Play Store for free. It is ad supported, but you probably won’t need to spend much time in the app itself to benefit from its functionality.
Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments