Gratitude saw 25% higher retention for widget users

Practicing gratitude may decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety, and improve mental health and life satisfaction¹. Consistent gratitude practice may lead to sustained improvements that last months². The mindfulness app Gratitude encourages consistency through micro daily journaling, affirmations, and vision boards. The app has over 6 million downloads, 150 thousand 5-star ratings, and 100 million journal entries logged.

Developers Divij Gupta and Narendra Aanjna developed widgets for each of their app’s core user journeys. Their goal was to meet users in their everyday moments without requiring the overhead of a full app session.

By surfacing interactive journaling prompts, affirmations, vision board images and metrics directly on the user’s home screen, the team lowered the barrier to entry for daily reflection and reported a 25% increase in retention for widget users and ~1K weekly journal entries from widgets. This increase in user loyalty translates to tangible health outcomes for the users: consistent habit formations that support long-term mental well-being.

The Challenge: modernize without decreasing retention

While the impact of widgets was clear, Gratitude’s original XML-based RemoteViews implementation created technical debt. As the app’s design system evolved toward Material 3, the legacy widgets became increasingly difficult to align with the modern UI. Every visual update required manual XML overhead and brittle workarounds, slowing developer velocity.

The Solution Part 1: migrating from XML to Jetpack Glance

To modernize their widgets, the team turned to Jetpack Glance.

They first consulted the Widgets on Android design page and canonical widget layouts to understand best practices for displaying information within a limited amount of space.

Then, they migrated their widget suite to Jetpack Glance. This declarative framework enabled the developers to move from planning to shipping in less than a month, saving about 50% development time, and saw two additional advantages:

• Replacing restrictive XML layouts with declarative code made the codebase easier to read, maintain, and reduced developer effort.
• Jetpack Glance allowed the team to more easily implement dynamic colors, flexible resizing, and expanded configuration options. These features ensure the widgets harmonize with a user's unique home screen layout.

The following GIF shows two Gratitude widgets and adaptive resizing:

generated_preview_api_reset_interval_ms 0

All of their efforts have made the Gratitude widget high quality and differentiated.

The Solution Part 2: promote new widgets in-app

The developers then used in-app widget pinning to increase widget discoverability and widget installs. Asking users to install widgets at a contextually relevant moment within the app helps users find their widgets without needing to go through the system widget picker. The following GIF shows Gratitude’s bottom sheet to add widgets from within the app:

The team also refactored widget packages, which changed widget receiver paths and caused widgets to be deleted from users’ home screens. Using previously stored user flags to identify widget users, they triggered another requestPinGlanceAppWidget prompt inviting widget users to use the new modernized widgets.

The strategy is working, as 10% of total DAU have adopted widgets.

 
Conclusion 

This Gratitude story shows that widgets can be tools for habit formation. By implementing quick actions to self-reflect right from the home screen, the team may have improved user loyalty. Gratitude reduced technical debt and modernized their widgets by adopting Jetpack Glance, and prompted users to add widgets within their app.

Getting Started

To get started with Jetpack Glance and learn about the technologies mentioned in this post, see these guides:

• Jetpack Glance Overview
• Widgets on Android design page
• Canonical widget layouts
• Generated Widget Previews
• Widget Quality Tiers
• In-app widget pinning
• Dynamic colors
• Resizing
• Configuration activities

See other widget case studies:

• Google’s Contacts app created a new widget 25% faster using Jetpack Glance
• SoundCloud uses Jetpack Glance to build Liked Tracks widget in just 2 weeks

1: Diniz, G., Korkes, L., Tristão, L. S., Pelegrini, R., Bellodi, P. L., & Bernardo, W. M. (2023). The effects of gratitude interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis. einstein (Sao Paulo)., 21, eRW0371. https://doi.org/10.31744/einstein_journal/2023RW0371

2: Bohlmeijer, E., Kraiss, J., Schotanus-Dijkstra, M., & ten Klooster, P. (2022). Gratitude as mood mediates the effects of a 6-weeks gratitude intervention on mental well-being: post hoc analysis of a randomized controlled trial. Front. Psychol., 12, 799447. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.799447