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Hi, I'm Ben, and I'm here to tell you about a little thing called widgets.

Widgets are a fantastic way to keep your users

up to date with what's going on in your app.

With just a quick glance at the home screen, you can inform users

about what's important without requiring them to open anything.

It's a great way to help save your users some time and

it gives your app a leg up on the competition.

On top of that, we can even add interactions with our widgets,

letting our users complete simple tasks right from the home screen.

However, widgets aren't quite like the rest of Android.

In fact, widgets are best thought of as views that you can embed in other apps.

Also, an app that can contain a widget is called an app widget host.

So your home screen app is almost definitely an app widget host.

Unfortunately this presents us with a few problems.

For starters, how do we communicate with a view that's inside another app?

And how would we even initialize that view in the first place?

We'll answer all of these all these questions in just a short while but for

now, let's start off with just creating a simple widget to display a color.

Then we'll build from that until we're finally able to display a list and

interact with that list right from our widget.

It'll be a lot of work, but we're going to take this one step at a time and

explain everything along the way.

So without further ado, let's move on to creating a widget.