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If you do not mess with your Windows Update settings, your probably know that recent Windows 10 and 11 versions have lock screen widgets that display weather, traffic, sports, and other useful information. While Microsoft lets you turn off widgets on the lock screen, there is no way to make the operating system display, say, just the weather widget—you can either have all of them or none. That, perhaps, may change soon. The latest Language Experience Pack for Windows 11 build 27747, which was released earlier this week for testing in the Canary Channel, spilled some beans at the upcoming lock screen widget improvements for Windows 11. As discovered by @xenopanther on X, Microsoft wants to let users add or remove separate lock screen widgets: It is worth noting that Microsoft might also be planning to let users add third-party widgets to the lock screen. As of right now, there are a bunch of third-party widgets that you can place in the Widget Board (there is still no way to place them on the desktop despite earlier rumors), so making them accessible on the lock screen can make widgets so much more useful, especially for customers with laptops and tablets. Sadly, like it usually goes with context-less discoveries like this, we can only guess what is the grand plan here. Either way, it is good to see Microsoft implementing improvements to the widget area, which, frankly, has potential, but feels quite neglected these days. As a reminder, you can turn off lock screen widgets in Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen > Lock Screen Status > None. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The first Windows 11 preview build in 2024 introduced a new weather widget for the operating system's lock screen with richer visuals and the ability to open more weather data from the lock screen (in Microsoft Edge, of course, not the stock Weather app). In a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft decided to port the new widget from Windows 11 to Windows 10. Microsoft announced the new weather widget for Windows 10 in the latest Release Preview update for the outgoing operating system. The company said that the richer weather experience on the lock screen would arrive on Windows 10 in the "coming weeks." You may remember that Microsoft said it no longer plans to release new feature updates for Windows 10. However, the Windows division recently experienced a notable management shift. As a result of that change, Microsoft is adjusting its efforts to port more new capabilities from Windows 11 to Windows 10, which still has an enormous install base with more than one billion monthly active devices. Copilot is probably the most notable feature Windows 10 borrowed from its successor, and the new Weather experience that serves as a gateway to MSN and Microsoft Edge (it really should launch the Weather app instead) shows that Microsoft wants to use those hundreds of millions Windows 10 users to boost its services. Moreover, according to Windows Central, Microsoft plans to resurrect the Beta Channel of the Windows Insider program for Windows 10 to let users test new features before they come to the general public. As of right now, the only channel available to Windows 10 users is Release Preview. Despite all those changes, Windows 10 is still on track to reach its end of life in October 2025. Those unwilling to migrate to Windows 11 (and whatever Microsoft plans to ship later this year) will be able to pay Microsoft for extended security updates. Source

Microsoft has been giving members of the Windows Insider Program a preview of a new lock screen experience. Today, the company confirmed that the new lock screen will become officially available in April for both Windows 11 23H2 users and Windows 10 version 22H2 users. In a post on the Windows IT Pro blog, Microsoft says the rollout will officially begin with the regular April monthly security update, also known as "Patch Tuesday," to people who use either version of Windows. This will be a "phased rollout," so some people may not get this update immediately on Patch Tuesday, which this time happens on April 9. The blog post states: Microsoft adds that if you only see the Weather card on the lock screen with the new detailed features, your Windows 10 or 11 PC is not yet eligible for the full experience, so you might have to wait until the full update rolls out. Microsoft also points out that some people in different regions of the world may see different cards on the lock screen. If you still have a Windows 10 PC, the lock screen experience will show the cards at the bottom but aligned to the left side. Windows 11 users will see the cards at the bottom but they will be aligned with the center. While this new feature will normally display information based on each user's location and language, Microsoft plans to update it in the future so people can customize the cards based on their own preferences. If you want to get these new lock screens, the latest non-security updates for Windows 11 and Windows 10 both have them. We have guides on how to enable them on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Source

Microsoft displays a lot of promotions and advertisement in its Windows 11 operating system. The lock screen is but one of the locations that Microsoft uses to display promotions to users of the operating system. This guide walks you through the steps of disabling lock screen ads and promotions in the Windows 11 operating system. The lock screen is the first screen that users see when they boot the operating system. While it is possible to bypass the screen entirely, by configuring Windows 11 to sign-in to a user account automatically, it is the first screen that most Windows users see. The lock screen may display changing photos and also options to find out more about the current image. What users may also see are promotions. The main image of this article demonstrates that. It shows an advert for Microsoft's Age of Empires IV game and another ad for PC Game Pass. Disabling lock screen ads -- not as straightforward as possible Windows 11 includes an option to turn off lock screen advertisement, but not for every display mode. The lock screen of the operating system displays changing photos, powered by Microsoft's Windows Spotlight feature, by default. As long as Windows Spotlight is enabled, lock screen ads will be displayed. There is no option to prevent this while the mode is active. The only option that users have is to switch to a different personalization option. Here is how that is done: Select Start and then Settings to load the Settings app. You may also press Ctrl-I on the keyboard to open it. Switch to Personalization > Lock screen. Use the menu next to "Personalize your lock screen" to change the setting to either Picture or Slideshow. Picture -- a single image is displayed whenever the lock screen is shown. Slideshow -- several images are rotated randomly whenever the lock screen is shown. Uncheck "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen" to turn off ads and promotions. The option is available for both Picture and Slideshow modes. Windows 11 won't display ads and promotions anymore on the lock screen once you have made the change. The only downside to this is that you won't get a new photo every now and then automatically as the background image of the lock screen. Closing Words It is unfortunate that Microsoft is not giving its customers a say in the matter. While it is possible to switch from Spotlight to another display mode to stop ads from being displayed on the lock screen, some users may prefer the changing lock screen photos that Spotlight provides. There is no technical barrier in adding the "tips" setting to Spotlight as well. Microsoft has made the decision deliberate and it looks as if it won't have a change of heart in the near future. In fact, more and more locations in Windows display ads and promotions. Now You: do you display the lock screen on your PCs? Source

Do away with the defaults and make the lock screen your own. You spend a lot of time looking at your lock screen, so it’s worth making sure that it’s tailored to your tastes — and with the right information on display, it can save you several dozen phone unlocks a day as well. While Google’s new Android 14 OS is hardly packed full of headline-grabbing new features — most of the upgrades are subtle and incremental — one area that has seen a noticeable revamp is the options for customizing the lock screen. These extra customization options follow what Apple did with iOS 16: you’ve now got more control over the way the clock and the widgets look on your lock screen, alongside all the settings that were already in place, which I’ll recap. Here’s how lock screen customization works now, as tested on a Google Pixel 6 Pro running Android 14. Clock and widgets Take your pick of clock styles. Beneath the colour choices are more options for your lock screen. You can change the style of the lock screen clock to really stamp your personal taste on it. You can also now change the shortcuts in the corners of the display, giving you easier access to the Android tools you use the most. Start by opening Settings, then tap Wallpaper and style > Lock screen. You can get to the same screen by tapping and holding on the lock screen, then choosing Customize lock screen. Swipe left or right on the lock screen image to cycle between the different analog and digital clock styles that are available. Tap Clock colour and size, then colour to pick a shade for the clock font. You can adjust the lightness of the shade using the slider at the bottom. Switch to Size to select a Dynamic clock (which changes size based on what else is on the lock screen) or a Small clock (which always stays small). More lock screen options For more lock screen options, head back to the Lock screen tab in the Wallpaper & style page. Another new one: scroll down to and tap Shortcuts to choose the quick links that will appear in the lower left and right corners of the lock screen. You can pick from Camera, Do Not Disturb, Flashlight, Home, Mute, QR code scanner, Video camera, Wallet, or None. It’s up to you which shortcuts appear on the lock screen. You can also manage lock screen notifications and text. That’s the new Android 14 customization options covered, but you still have the previous set of options to play around with, too. Still on the Lock screen tab, toggle Show notifications on the lock screen to either show notifications (for extra convenience) or hide them (for extra privacy). Tap More lock screen options to get to a bunch of additional settings. Select Privacy to show or hide “sensitive content” in notifications (such as previews of incoming messages and emails). If you’ve set up your phone for multiple users, you can enable Add users from lock screen. Tap Add text on lock screen to have a message displayed — maybe your contact details (for if your phone gets lost) or a personal mantra to get you through the day. The Use device controls toggle switch determines whether or not you can control various Google Home devices (like smart lights) from the Quick Settings panel without unlocking your phone. The Double-line clock toggle switch controls whether or not the clock expands to fill two lines when the lock screen is empty. Tap Now Playing (if you have a Pixel phone) to control whether or not recognized song titles are shown on the lock screen; if the songs aren’t immediately recognized, there will be a search icon you can tap. If your Android phone supports an always-on display, you’ll see an Always show time and info toggle switch. Turn this on to always have the clock and any notifications shown on screen, but be aware that this will have some impact on battery life. If you have a Pixel, you can also enable Tap to check phone or Lift to check phone to more easily check your notifications. Lastly, there’s a Wake screen for notifications toggle switch you can enable if you want the screen to momentarily brighten up when notifications come in. Back to the basics Of course, basic lock screen customizations are still present and correct in Android 14. Head back to Wallpaper & style > Lock screen, and you’ll see a selection of wallpapers to pick from. Tap More wallpapers to see the full range of provided backdrops or to pick one from your phone’s gallery. Pick a wallpaper from Android’s built-in selection, or choose a photo of your own. colours can match the wallpaper you’ve chosen — or not. When you go into More wallpapers and choose a new image, you’ll be asked if you want to set it as the backdrop for the lock screen, the homescreen, or both screens. Above the wallpaper thumbnails on the Wallpaper & stylepage are the colour swatches: tap any icon to apply that colour scheme, or tap the three dots for more choices on the System colours page. Android now lets you set the colours of the operating system (menu backgrounds, fonts, accents and so on) using a palette based on your wallpaper pick. On the System colours page, tap Wallpaper colours if you want to use this approach. Tap Other coloursif you’d rather have the colour scheme fixed independently of the wallpaper you’ve chosen. There’s also a Dark themetoggle switch you can use to opt for a darker version of the selected colour scheme. All of these changes are previewed in the images above as you cycle through the different options. Source

Unlocking your phone and opening an app is too much work, apparently Your phone’s lock screen is the hottest new real estate in tech. Apple made the iPhone’s lock screen a centerpiece of iOS 16, giving users more control over how theirs looks and works. But while Apple talked about pretty clock fonts and nifty color-matched wallpapers, it also showed off a world in which your lock screen is more than just a security measure: it’s becoming another surface on which companies can put information, apps, and even ads. Apple’s far from the only company thinking about this, too. TechCrunch reports that Glance, a lock screen content company (which apparently is a thing!) is already in talks with US carriers and plans to launch on some Android phones in the US in the next two months. The competition for your eyeballs and attention has already come out of apps and onto your home screen, through widgets and notifications. Now it looks like it’s headed one step further: onto the first thing you see when you turn on your phone, before you even pick it up or unlock it. That might be at least one step too far. If you’ve never seen a Glance-running device before, one way to imagine the app is sort of like a Snapchat Discover feed on your phone’s lock screen. The company serves up a rotating set of news headlines, videos, quizzes, games, and photos that appear every time your phone screen turns on. Glance calls these content cards “glances,” naturally, and says that users consume these glances 65 times a day on average. Glance is a neverending content machine, on your lock screen Image: Glance And, of course, it’s all filled with ads. Glance is a subsidiary of InMobi Group, an Indian ad tech company. It has partnerships with a number of manufacturers, including Samsung and Xiaomi, and the company says its software is built into more than 400 million phones around Asia. Google is an investor in the company; so is Peter Thiel. In a certain light, Glance or something like it is a totally sensible idea. You don’t need to constantly dip in and out of apps looking for news and information, you don’t even need to unlock your phone, you just trust your device to bring you something interesting every time you turn it on. And a couple of non-intrusive ads won’t hurt, right? After all, I bought the Kindle with ads on the lock screen to save a few bucks, and it doesn’t bother me. (Though I never would have bought the Prime Exclusive Phones that came with lock screen ads, and apparently neither would anyone else.) Apple has echoed this idea, talking about how it sees a more feature-rich lock screen as a way to help you use your phone less. Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi referred to the lock screen as “the face of your phone,” and said that features like Live Activities could make it easier to get quick information without having to unlock your phone and open yourself up to all the distractions inside. “If you can get the answer at a glance, then you don’t unlock,” he said, “and once you’ve unlocked your phone, you almost forget why you’re there in the first place!” Letting you customize your lock screen is a good idea! Image: Apple But by opening up this space, these companies are offering apps and advertisers a chance to get even closer to you. Developers will surely build Live Activities that stick around long after they’re done being useful, the better to grab you every time your phone lights up. Platforms will find ways to pull more of their content onto lock screens, attempting to hook you into the feed before you even press a button. Generally speaking, most users don’t change their settings, and you better believe developers will use that to their advantage. “Consumers will move from seeking content to consuming what is shown to them,” InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari told Forbes when Glance launched. That’s super bleak! And probably true! Most of all, a Glance-like future is a way of turning smartphones even further into consumption-only devices. And is “easier access to endless feeds of medium-interesting content” really a worthwhile goal? As we look to reset our relationship with technology, I would argue we should be finding places to add friction, to give you what you need when you look at your phone... but to also help you realize you didn’t need to look at your phone at all. And if, as Federighi said, the lock screen’s job is to help you avoid distraction, I can’t imagine a worse idea than putting a TikTok-style video feed between you and your home screen. Glance will surely have competition, but it’s already a good example of where this is all headed. In June, it held Glance Live Fest, a virtual three-day festival that took place entirely on users’ lock screens. It streamed concerts and interactive challenges, live tutorials and interviews, and a ton of live shopping content, to more than 70 million users. It’s like an opt-out music festival, to which you’re transported every time someone sends you a text. That sounds distracting, frustrating, and just flat-out exhausting. There’s no question that our lock screens could be better. The whole “running list of notifications” thing isn’t great, and a push for more personalization will make a lot of users happy. But that space should belong to users and users only, not turn into yet another breeding ground for distraction and advertising. We should be taking back control of our phones, not giving more of it away. Apps and advertisers are coming for your lock screen, and it’s going to be exhausting

Windows 11 started rolling out well over a week ago (check out our review here), but due to the staggered nature of distribution, it may not be available to everyone just yet and will slowly start to show up for supported PCs over the next few months. There are ways to skip the queue, but before you do that, it is important to understand what changes you can expect with Microsoft's latest OS refresh. This is exactly what we've been discussing in our ongoing Closer Look series over the past couple of months. So far, we have taken a look at Search, Widgets, the Start menu, Snap Layouts and Snap Groups, the Taskbar, quick settings and notifications, Virtual Desktops, power and battery settings, default apps configurations, File Explorer, context menus, Teams integration, the updated Clock app in Windows 11, the Microsoft Store, the Snipping Tool, and the Paint app refresh. Today, we'll be discussing the updated lock screen experience. For the purpose of this hands-on, we'll be taking a look at the generally available Windows 11 build versus a publicly available and up-to-date Windows 10 (version 21H1 build 19043.1288). Lock screen in Windows 10 Starting with Windows 10, you get to view the lock screen after you boot up your PC. The UI is fairly simple, you get a wallpaper with some search icons and a camera icon next to them, allowing you to explore more about what's being shown in the photo. Clicking on any of these icons opens the result of the relevant Bing query on Microsoft Edge. You also get the time and date shown on the bottom left of your screen in a pretty big font. Clicking on the Wi-Fi and battery icons on the bottom-right of the screen take you to the next screen so you can't really interact with them. They are only there to show you the status of your machine at a very high-level. So, if you wanted to view the actual battery percentage directly on this screen, you're out of luck. Sign-in screen in Windows 10 Once you press enter or swipe on the lock screen, you get the sign-in screen where you unlock your PC through your preferred authentication method; I use a PIN. The UI is quite straightforward here too. The wallpaper is blurred in the background, you have your display picture, name, and text box to enter a PIN in the foreground. Interestingly, the icons on the bottom-right corner of the screen work here. You can click on the Wi-Fi icon to switch your internet connection, toggle accessibility settings from the Ease of Access icon (shown in the screenshot), and utilize the Power icon to put your PC to sleep, shut down it down, and so on. I wouldn't call the UI consistent because the Wi-Fi and Power configuration UI shown to me have a dark background even though my PC is currently on a light theme, whereas the Ease of Access settings are shown on a light theme. But again, inconsistency just seems to be a trademark for Microsoft when it comes to UI design. Lock screen settings in Windows 10 Finally, we have the lock screen settings. Here, you can configure whether you want the background to be refreshed via Windows spotlight, a slideshow, or a static image, choose apps to show detailed and quick statuses on the lock screen and toggle the behavior of the image on the sign-in screen. Nothing too complex. Lock screen in Windows 11 For better or worse, Microsoft hasn't completely flipped the script when it comes to Windows 11. You'll immediately notice that the time and date has been moved to the center of the lock screen, which aligns with Windows 11's center-focused design theme. The font size and type is also different and personally find it more aesthetic. Instead of the round icons for search and camera on the wallpaper that we have in Windows 10, we now get square boxes with rounded corners. They are also more pronounced, which means that it's easier to spot them on the background. I find this to be a very good change, as I use this feature occasionally. Sign-in screen in Windows 11 The sign-in screen is quite similar so I'll only focus on the changes. The text box to enter your PIN has rounded corners, in line with Windows 11's design. The icons have been refreshed and I'm happy to see the updated icon for Ease of Access as the previous one was not intuitive at all. Unfortunately, the behavior of the icons remains the same. The Wi-Fi and Power UI shown to me still don't respect my theme settings and sport a dark theme. The worst offender is the Ease of Access configuration UI (screenshot above), which seems to have been lifted as-is from Windows 10, there are no rounded corners or updated toggles. Lock screen settings in Windows 11 The lock screen settings are basically the same as Windows 10. That said, you do get some UI changes that are more consistent with the design language of Windows 11. I think they look nice overall. Overall, while I like most of the changes made to the lock screen experience in Windows 11, the lack of attention towards others infuriates me a bit. It's not like it bothers my workflow, but it just emphasizes the company's commitment to shipping Windows 11 by October 5 without really focusing on the details. It's as if the engineers over at Microsoft had this idea to revamp the sign-in experience, started work on it, updated the main screen by October 5, and then decided "Nah man, let's leave the Ease of Access settings as-is and let's not update the configuration UI to match the system theme either, nobody will notice". Microsoft's lax attitude towards some Windows 11 design components just paints a troubling picture where engineers rushed to meet the October 5 deadline to ship Windows 11 for some unknown reason. While things like these won't impact your workflow, they'll definitely bother you when you start to notice the inconsistencies in design in a lot of places. Closer Look: Lock screen in Windows 11