Android 12 DP2: People Space widget takes shape, reminds you to talk to your friends and family

One of the more interesting upcoming features of Android 12, teased in leaked mockups, is “People Space” which puts your friends and family on your home screen. With the second pre-release of Android 12, this People Space widget has begun to take shape.

Branded in the early mockups as “Conversations,” the “People Space” widget places a prominent reminder of your loved ones, with the mockups showing examples of unread messages, people you haven’t messaged in a while, and friends’ birthdays. Of course, those mockups are only aspirational until Googlers make them a reality.

With Android 12 Developer Preview 2, our Dylan Roussel was able to enable the People Space widget to see what progress had been made. When you add the widget to your home screen, you’re asked to choose from a list of your recently received notifications that are tagged as “Conversations” by Android. For instance, in the screenshot below, you can see Telegram and Slack are supported.

Once you’ve selected a conversation, you’re able to place the People Space widget on your home screen, where it will tell you how long its been since you’ve chatted with that particular person or group, such as “Last chatted less than 1 hour ago.” It will be interesting to watch the feature develop over the next few months, between now and Android 12’s release, to see what other kinds of social integrations this People Space will gain. So far there are no signs of previously leaked features like the birthday reminders.

One thing that stands out as odd is that the People Space widget defaults to a “3 x 2” size, which is clearly much larger than just the single conversation reminder needs to be. Additionally, on the original leak, we see multiples of the widget arranged with varying corner curves.

In a time where it’s all too easy to get lost in the day-to-day and forget to stay in touch with the people who matter to you, Google seems to have quite the winner on its hands already with Android 12’s People Space. In some ways, this could almost be considered a Digital Wellbeing effort, at least in the sense of using technology to do some good in your daily life.

Dylan Roussel contributed to this article