Please read the earlier posts in this topic, the problem is covered … but no solution in sight, as Kurt says.
You’ll notice that the search bar gets replaced by At a glance, at midnight following the latest boot. On some phones, anyway. That’s probably useful for any dev working on the problem, but for you it just means that, if you prefer to see the date and not the search bar (my case), try not turning off your phone at night, put it on Airplane mode instead. You can get rid of the search bar completely by disabling the Google app. That might have repercussions but none that have bothered me.
I guess what would be most useful would be to not place them at the exact same spot! Both widgets worked (mostly) normally back in Android 11 when they weren’t stacked.
Oh well, I don’t really care (besides my annoyance about wasted screen real estate) since I never ever used the search bar, and the “At a Glance” widget is more a (malfunctioning) gadget than a really useful feature anyway. -shrug-
I actually got a message from support that this could be fixed in the latest update. @CircusJim may have gotten it too. That’s why I originally thought the note was related to this issue, and why I reacted the way I did:
I really hope the fix will make it into the next update.
This one is on me @Razem. I may have counted my chickens before they hatched when it comes to At a glance.
Widget randomly changes from one to the other - we have a fix in the pipeline for this. It was delayed so we could focus on security patches, A13 prep, fixing aptX, VoLTE settings… I can’t say when the fix will come out but it’s on the way.
Long-pressing the search bar shows At a glance preferences - according to our team, this is the default behavior of the search bar app provided by Google. It’s closed source so there’s nothing we can do about it.
I don’t know if this is supposed to be a ‘feature’ or a bug, but after upgrading to Android 12, I now have an immovable widget(?) taking up five app spaces at the top of my home screen. On some days it’s the date and on others it’s a superfluous DDG browser bar, neither of which I can delete!
It’s both. In A11 the (irremovable) search bar was on the bottom, and there was a widget (“At a Glance”) on top telling you the date (and sometimes weather and such). As you see in your first screenshot.
With A12, both widgets got moved to the exact same spot (!), and since they are both irremovable, they fight for the spot and you get to see the winner, or at least its corpse…
As chantoine said above, the only way to get rid of them is to use another launcher, since they are both irremovable Google widgets (even if you can change the search to something non-Google thanks to European law).
If you don’t use the search widget anyway, you can at least get rid of the bottom one in your second screenshot, only the (dead) top one is irremovable.
This is more or less resolved by the Android 13 update. The good thing is that it no longer switches between two widgets. The bad thing (in my opinion) is that instead of the At a Glance widget, the search bar was chosen to be at the top. I’m not really sure if it’s the intended behavior and it definitely feels weird. I’m marking this topic as resolved, but until we have a definitive confirmation that this is Google’s intended behavior and not Fairphone’s design choice, I’ll mark it just as a workaround in the list of issues.
I’m rather confused by that statement. I have updated to Android 13 and can only see the date at the top of the home screen now. I consistently had a DDG search bar on Android 12 (without any fights for the top slot), which would be my preferred behaviour. Note that the Google App is not active.
It should basically restart your phone and prompt you to select your default search engine again. I’m curious if it lets you keep the DDG search bar or if it actually prioritizes the At a Glance widget.
