[Q] Which is better for performance: one big widget or many smaller widgets?

Hi all,

From a processing overhead and memory standpoint, I was wondering if it's better to have one big widget or many smaller widgets. I have a big widget that has a lot of functionality, but I've noticed that it tends to make my phone (Galaxy Note 3) jumpy, especially in things like games. If I remove the widget from my home screen, everything smooths back out. I know that Zooper takes all of the widget elements and renders them as a single unit, so I didn't know if maybe it would help smooth things out if I broke the widget up into smaller ones. Or would that just make it worse?

Thanks,
Jeremy

TheStretchedElf said:

Is it possible to have one widget cover the entire screen? I thought 4x4 was the biggest available.

Also, is there a way of combining two widgets into one? For example, I have a 4x1 weather widget and a 4x3 weather bitmap icon which, by the sounds of it, would work better as a single widget.

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It is possible to have one widget over the entire screen, but it may depend on your launcher. Some launchers, like Lightning, Nova and Themer, allow for easy resizing of widgets to be as big or as small as you want. The best way to do it is to place a new Zooper widget on your home screen, and before you tap it to start editing it, resize it to the size you want. Then when you go into edit mode, Zooper will pick up on that size and behave accordingly. For example, I have a 6x5 and a 6x3, neither of which are available options when dropping a new widget initially.

As for combining widgets, I haven't found a good way of doing that yet. I think you'd have to create a new widget, import the one with the most elements into it, and then manually create the rest of the elements from the other widget and configure them. An alternative may be to export the .xml for both of them to a computer and add the two together there. This way you should at least be able to get all of the elements into one widget, but then when you load it into Zooper, you'll need to move the elements around because they'll probably overlap at that point.

Other than that, if someone knows of a better way, I'd be happy to hear it.

Referring back to my original question that kicked this thread off, thanks to everyone for your input. @sandman7793 especially had some great points, which I really appreciate. I've done some more digging, and it looks like some of my performance issue was actually related to Greenify rather than Zooper. I was seeing jumpiness in things like games because I had them under my list of apps to forcibly keep hibernated. Oops. Once I figured that out, everything is working smooth again.