auウィジェット

» see au.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

This was not a thing you went and got. It came in the handset, 標準搭載, built into every au Android phone running 4.0 or later, which means it only ever existed for people who bought their phone over one counter in one country. There is no Play Store listing anybody has managed to turn up. Outside that counter the product had no way of reaching you at all.

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced it on 20 April 2012 and started shipping it in the second half of May, on the HTC J ISW13HT. The idea was that the Android home screen should be doing something while you were not looking at it. Six panels were offered, filling themselves in from the carrier's own services, and the whole thing cost nothing and required no application form.

It stopped on 26 January 2021, after eight years and eight months. KDDI never published a shutdown notice that anyone has found. What exists instead is a page on au's register of ended services, written entirely in the past tense, which is where the date comes from and where the only instruction sits.

~ the case file ~

~ the six panels ~

One panel tracked up to nine registered friends and let you call or message any of them in a tap. Another showed what those friends had shared into au Cloud. A weather panel pulled rain radar for wherever you were standing. One more listed restaurants and places nearby, wired into au's navigation app, and another carried coupons and app recommendations from au Smart Pass.

The news panel is the one worth keeping. Alongside ordinary headlines it carried 超速報ニュース, which KDDI described as arriving at the same moment the ticker crawls across the bottom of a television screen. In 2012 that was a real claim: your home screen lighting up with the bulletin while the television in the room was still crawling it.

The friends panel needed a Friends Note login to work. Friends Note closed on 28 August 2017, nearly forty-one months before the widgets did.

~ please delete it yourself ~

The whole of KDDI's farewell is two sentences on a page nobody was directed to. The service ended on 26 January 2021, it says, and then: 「auウィジェットを削除いただきますようお願い致します」. We ask that you delete the au Widget. No cause is given and nothing is named to take its place.

There is a tidy symmetry in it that KDDI presumably did not intend. The product was put on the phone by the carrier without anybody asking for it, and taken off the phone by the owner, because the carrier could not reach in and do it. A thing that arrived unrequested left by request, and the request was the last anyone heard.

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