Are screensavers making a comeback in Android 13?

In Android 13, it seems that screensavers are getting more interesting. Google wants to display useful information on top of your screensaver. It concerns things such as the weather forecast, the clock and more information. Google may want to make its operating system more suitable for PCs.

Android 13 screensavers

For years you can discover the possibility to use screensavers in the settings of Android phones. Android includes three kinds of screensavers; a clock, a gradient animation, and a Google Photos slideshow.

If you didn’t know your phone had that option, that’s not surprising. Screensavers were originally on PCs to avoid pixel burn-in. This is no longer a problem on modern monitors, and screensavers on Android phones are always less interesting than, for example, the always-on screen on which notifications appear.

In Android 13, screensavers are again getting attention, because Google now wants to show relevant information on top of the current screensavers, which has Esper discovers. This includes weather information and the time and date that will be shown on your screen from now on. You can turn that option on and off on your Android 13 phone and you can also preview each time. The setting is hidden in the code of the second developer preview of Android 13.

Sudden focus on desktop

But of course you may wonder why Google suddenly comes with an improvement for screensavers. We saw earlier that the company has also developed a custom interface of Android for PC and these screensavers may also have a role to play mainly on PCs. Screensavers are more popular on desktop than on phones. With that, it is still not clear why exactly Google wants to make Android more suitable as an operating system for PCs. Google already has Chrome OS with which it competes with Windows and macOS.

The most plausible explanation may be in desktop mode for phones that Google has been working on for some time. With that feature, you will be able to connect a phone to a monitor to use it as a PC. Apps then open in windows. So it may be that desktop mode will be part of Android 13 and we will learn more about it with the upcoming beta versions.

What do you think? Why is Google making improvements to screensavers and the Android interface for desktops? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.