Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The ability to plop widgets anywhere on your home screen is one of the more convenient things about Android. But one huge company, Spotify, is doing away with its widget. As noted by 9to5Google, Spotify’s most recent Android app update quietly phased out the mini-player that previously let users pause / play music or skip tracks from their device’s home screen. If you had the widget on your home screen, you’ll now see either empty space or it’ll be non-functional.
Since you can access the same functionality and controls by dragging down the notification shade, Spotify seems to have decided that the widget was redundant. “We always take retiring features in Spotify very seriously,” the company wrote in a short support post on the…