Google’s new widget puts your most important investments on your home screen

Google Search helps us get a lot done during the day, and if you’re even moderately interested in finance or tracing your investments, your Discover feed is probably chock-full of news from the finance world. Amidst all the noise, it can be quite difficult to keep track of how your investments are performing, through multiple Google searches. Thankfully, the Google app on Android has a new widget that makes market tracking much easier.

ANDROID POLICE VIDEO OF THE DAY

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

As Google announced as part of its bigger June feature rollout, it has added a new Finance widget to the Google app. It can be used to conveniently track indexes, cryptocurrencies, and stock prices in markets around the world. The widget shows you a detailed daily graph for one stock along with its current price, percentage increase/decrease during the day, and an arrow pointing up or down to depict the same. Below the graph you can find further stocks from your watchlist, which you can manage via a shortcut at the bottom next to a manual refresh button. Tapping each followed investment on the widget opens up a Google Search results page for it, containing more detailed information.

<!–[if IE 9]> <![endif]–>

A quick peek at the widget settings reveals you can configure which stock, index, or crypto you want featured at the top of the widget with the big graph — a specific stock like one in which you have the most money invested, or just the one with the biggest gain or loss recorded that day. Similarly, you can sort the remaining investments alphabetically, by symbol, or by day percentage change in ascending or descending order.

Settings pages for the new Google widget

Google uses a web-based interface for configuring which stocks you follow, available if you hit the Watchlist button in the lower left corner of the widget or head over to google.com/finance. Here, you can follow more indices, stocks where your funds are parked, and crypto you’re willing to gamble on. Google helpfully allows curating multiple watchlists, so you can stay more organized.

Google’s web interface to curate watchlists

The new widget is available in the latest beta update delivered through the Google Play Store, though given the recent announcement, it should come to the stable version soon. If you aren’t a beta tester, you can sideload the Google app beta from APKMirror and get started right away.