PokeWidget 1.6

This one installs over 1.5 and keeps your widgets. And PokéWidget now runs on Windows too.

Android 8.0 and up · PokeWidget-1.6.apk
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · PokeWidget-1.6-windows-setup.exe
A .sha256 is attached next to each if you want to check what you downloaded.

---

New

• PokéWidget on Windows. Widgets sit right on your desktop, on the wallpaper under your open apps, like a widget on a phone's home screen — no frame, no taskbar button, no background unless you pick one. Drag one anywhere by the Pokémon itself, pull its corner to resize it, and hover it to edit or take it off the desktop. Pin it to float it above every window while you work. Widgets come back after a restart, where you left them, and a tray icon keeps PokéWidget running with the settings window closed.
• Surprise me. A new choice under "When tapped": each tap swaps the Pokémon on the widget for a random one and plays the newcomer's cry. It replaces the sprite — it never adds a second one. Pick from every Pokémon, or from a shortlist of up to ten of your own with "Only my picks".
• Use my location. Live forms can follow the weather where you are, without typing a city. It asks for permission only when you tap the button, reads your position once, and keeps only the city.
• Live forms keep the city's clock. Lycanroc, Shaymin, Morpeko and Castform now follow the time of day and sunrise of the city you chose, not your own — and Settings shows the time there so you can check.
• Every tap action on the desktop too, Surprise me and live forms included.

Fixed

• Nothing waits for a download when you tap. Your Surprise me picks, every form a live form can switch to, and the shiny or back sprite a tap toggles to are all downloaded ahead of time, cries included. A Pokémon with no Game Boy cry has its modern one ready before you tap, instead of finding out then.
• No more "app not responding" on Use my location. Finding where you are could freeze the app for a few seconds on some phones. If the app ever does freeze, Settings now keeps a report of it, the way it already did for crashes.
• Cities you couldn't find. "Richmond VA" found Richmond Vale in the Caribbean, and "Richmond Virginia" found nothing. City search now understands state, province and country names and abbreviations.
• The weather card fits the city on one line, and says it updates itself about once an hour, so "Check now" is only for when you can't wait.
• Trainers load on restrictive networks. On school and office networks that block their hosts, trainer sprites and a few sprite sets now come through another route instead of never appearing.
• A short note under "Add to home screen" says a new widget can take a few seconds to appear the first time, while its animation and cry download.

Nothing changes unless you want it to

A widget you've already placed looks and behaves exactly as before. Tapping still plays the cry until you choose another tap action, and nothing asks for your location unless you tap the button.

Installing on Windows

The installer isn't signed by a big publisher yet, so Windows may say it protected your PC. Click More info, then Run anyway. Then make a widget and put it on the desktop.

Mac

Coming soon. A test build is going out to Discord testers first — if it holds up, it ships in the next release.

---

Sprites and cries download on first use and are cached, so a placed widget keeps animating offline. Trainer sprites and battle backgrounds come from Pokémon Showdown; trainers seen from behind from the pret decompilations; scenery from PokéRogue, whose art is CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Weather from Open-Meteo.

If PokéWidget made your home screen a little better, you can buy me a coffee.

Unofficial fan project. No affiliation with Nintendo, Creatures Inc. or GAME FREAK inc.

Full changelog · everything that changed since 1.5

PokeWidget 1.5

This one installs over 1.4 and keeps your widgets. No uninstall, nothing to set up again — the painful part was 1.4.

Thanks to everyone who sent feedback after the first release. Nearly everything below came from you.

Android 8.0 and up · PokeWidget-1.5.apk · a .sha256 is attached if you want to check what you downloaded.

---

New

• Trainers. Pair your Pokémon with a trainer: gym leaders, Elite Four, champions, rivals, villains and ordinary trainer classes from every region. Side by side, or as a battle scene seen from behind. Where a game really drew the player from behind (Red, Leaf, Ethan, Kris, Brendan, May, Wally, Steven) that sprite is used; otherwise the front is shown turned around, and the app tells you so.
• Battle backgrounds. A library of battlefields from the games, as an alternative to a plain colour behind the sprite.
• Scenery. Somewhere for your Pokémon to actually stand: plains, forest, beach, cave, volcano, open sea, a back alley, space, and thirty or so more. Unlike a battlefield there is no platform painted in, so a Pokémon of any size stands on the ground rather than hovering over a stage built for something else. Seven of them — Sunny Day, Sunset, Starry Night, Snowfield, Seaside, Autumn and Blossom — are drawn by the app itself and need nothing downloaded, so there is always something to pick even on a fresh install with no connection.
• Mirror a sprite so your Pokémon can face the other way. It sits next to the preview, and works as a tap action too.
• Shiny is easy to find. The Shiny switch now sits right under the preview and is always there. If a sprite set has no shiny of your Pokémon, tapping it tells you why instead of the option quietly disappearing. The Pokémon page has one too, and "Add to home screen" keeps it.

Fixed

• Animated sprites really fill the widget now. "Fill the widget" and "4×" were being quietly overruled by the widget's memory limit, so big animated Pokémon came out small — Torterra ended up smaller than Psyduck. The size you pick is the size you get; on a tight memory budget the sprite is drawn a little softer instead of smaller.
• New size option: True size. Big Pokémon look big and small ones look small, instead of everything being stretched to fill the widget.
• No more doubled sprites. Some Showdown sprites, Fidough among them, showed two copies stacked on top of each other. The GIF decoder has been replaced with one that handles those frames correctly.
• Cries play the moment you tap. They are kept ready instead of being loaded on every tap, a second tap no longer waits for the first cry to finish, and a cry interrupted mid-download can no longer come out clipped.
• Widgets are sized for the space they really have, which some launchers report confusingly in portrait.
• Battle scenes stand on the platform at every widget shape, trainers no longer draw twice when you move them between layouts, and the Game Boy-era sets lost their white card.

Nothing changes unless you want it to

Trainers, backgrounds and mirroring are all off until you turn them on. A widget you have already placed, or a new one you don't customise, looks exactly as it did.

Also: PokéWidget in your browser

The same widgets now run on a computer, built from one shared set of rules and the very same Pokémon data. Open it in a browser — nothing to install. A desktop app built from that same code is still being tested and isn't part of this release.

---

Sprites and cries download on first use and are cached, so a placed widget keeps animating offline. Trainer sprites and battle backgrounds come from Pokémon Showdown; trainers seen from behind from the pret decompilations; scenery from PokéRogue, whose art is CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Unofficial fan project. No affiliation with Nintendo, Creatures Inc. or GAME FREAK inc.

Full changelog · everything that changed since 1.4

PokeWidget 1.4

Important: Uninstall the Previous Version

You have to uninstall the old version first.

This is the first build signed with a real release key rather than a temporary debug key. This changes the app's identity as far as Android is concerned, so it will not install over the existing version.

Any widgets you currently have set up will need to be added again.

This is a one-time cost. From this release onward, future updates will install over the previous version and keep everything.

What's New

• Properly signed — future versions can now update in place.
• Join the Discord — available in Settings. New versions will be announced there since a sideloaded app cannot update itself.
• Improved crash reporting — if the app crashes, the crash report in Settings now has a Send in Discord button that copies the report and opens the server.

Installing

PokéWidget isn't on the Play Store yet, so Android may show two security warnings. Both are normal.

1. Open the APK. Android will ask whether your browser is allowed to install apps. Allow it.

2. Play Protect may say it doesn't recognise the app. Tap Install anyway.

   • If the option is hidden, tap More details first.

3. Long-press your home screen → Widgets → PokéWidget → drag a widget onto your home screen.

Requirements: Android 8.0+

SHA-256:

322c8f07617d491e8bd442f18dde28f2e9133d89ae40277face96681b0f59c08

Full Changelog

[View the full changelog](https://github.com/IronicRayquaza/Pokewidget/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md)

---