Spinning from the home screen

How do you add the widget?

The same way as any Android widget: press and hold an empty part of your home screen, choose Widgets, find Spin Wheel in the list, then press and hold the widget to place it. When you drop it, you choose which of your wheels it holds.

That last step is the part that makes it useful rather than decorative — the widget is bound to a specific wheel, so a tap is a decision rather than a shortcut into a menu.

What can the widget do?

• Spin the wheel you assigned it, in one tap, without opening the app.
• Show you the result in place, on the home screen.
• Work with no internet connection, like everything else in the app.
• Sit alongside more than one widget, if you want a different wheel on each.

Why does it change how often you use a picker?

Because the cost of asking drops to nothing. A decision worth ten seconds is not worth unlocking your phone, finding an app, waiting for it to load and then finding the right wheel — so most of those decisions get made by whoever speaks loudest instead.

At one tap it becomes worth it for the small things: who washes up, who goes first, which of the four takeaways. That is the class of decision this category is actually for, and it is the class that friction kills.

Does the widget keep working after a restart?

Yes. Android clears some scheduled work when a phone restarts, and the app is set up to re-establish what it needs so a widget you placed does not quietly stop being useful after the first reboot.

Does it sit running in the background?

No. The widget does its work when you tap it: it draws a result and updates itself. There is nothing to poll, because the draw needs no server and no connection — which is the reason a one-tap spin is possible at all.

Can you have more than one widget?

Yes, and it is the setup that gets used most. One widget for the household chore rota, one for what to eat, one for who goes first — each bound to its own wheel, each a single tap.

At that point the home screen is doing the job the app was built for and the app itself is mostly for editing. That is the intended end state rather than a workaround.

What if the widget is the wrong size on your home screen?

Resize it the usual Android way: press and hold the widget until it is selected, then drag the handles at its edges. Most launchers let you make it wider or taller, and a wheel with a handful of options reads perfectly well small.

A wheel with forty names on it is a different matter — at widget size the labels stop being legible, which is a reason to point the widget at a short wheel and keep the long lists inside the app where there is room for them.

What if a whole wheel is more than the question needs?

There are quick deciders built into the app for that: a coin flip, dice, a random number in a range, and a plain yes or no. They need no setup at all, which makes them the right tool when there is nothing to list — you just need something other than you to choose.

The widget is not in the list — what now?

Android caches the list of available widgets, and a newly installed app sometimes does not appear until the launcher refreshes. Two things usually fix it: open the app once, then look again, or restart the phone.

It is also worth checking you are looking in the widget picker rather than the app drawer — pressing and holding an empty part of the home screen is what opens the right list. Some launchers put widgets behind their own menu, and a few third-party launchers restrict them entirely.