Android 17 Beta 1 finally lets you remove the At a Glance widget on your home screen

After a delayed rollout earlier this week, Google has officially launched Android 17 Beta 1 (strangely, on a Friday afternoon with extremely little fanfare). We’re digging through the update to see what’s new, and while there isn’t too much in this initial build of Android 17, there are a few visual tweaks worth noting.

The first, and most notable, is the ability to hide the At a Glance widget on your home screen. This is something Google tested with a select group of users in Android 16 QPR3 Beta 1, but it appears to be widely available in Android 17 Beta 1.

To hide At a Glance, press and hold on the widget, tap Settings, and tap the new toggle next to “Show on home screen.” Toggling this off will remove At a Glance from the top-left corner of your first home screen, though you will still see it on the lock screen. You can also use the newly freed-up home screen space for app icons, other widgets, or whatever else you want to do with it.

This is something I’ve wanted for years, so seeing it in Android 17 is fantastic.

The other UI changes are much less impactful, though still worth mentioning. The volume bar now features a volume slider icon at the bottom, replacing the three-dot icon in Android 16. Tapping it still opens the main volume page, and the new icon is much more representative of it.

The sun icon in the brightness slider in Quick Settings has also been updated with rounded edges, compared to the sharp design in Android 16.

Other than these changes, plus some new customization options for the home screen Google Search bar, that’s about it for what’s new in Android 17 Beta 1. We know Google is working on much more interesting features (such as the split Quick Settings and notification panel option), but we aren’t seeing those in this first beta release. And that’s expected! Google typically doesn’t include a ton of user-facing changes in these initial betas, so this is par for the course.

We’ll keep hunting for anything else we might have overlooked, but we’d expect to see the really interesting stuff in future Beta updates — and possibly extending to Android 17 QPR1 Beta builds later this year.