Microsoft has released its weekly build of Windows 11 to Insiders in the Dev channel, and along with it, a couple of big additions are also here. Last week, the company debuted its first third-party widget for Windows 11 with Meta's Messenger app, and this week, there's another one — Spotify — arriving alongside Windows 11 build 25290. This new widget gives you quick access to your playlists so you can start playing them right away.
Additionally, there's a new widget for Microsoft's own Phone Link app. While it is developed by Microsoft, this widget isn't web-based like the widgets Windows 11 had before. This is actually based on the Phone Link app, and it can show you content like battery information for your phone as well as recent messages from it.
As usual, to get these widgets, you'll just have to update the apps to the latest versions available on the Microsoft Store. Then, open the Widgets panel and click + to add a widget, where you should find your installed apps. You should also start to see more widgets become available now that the Windows App SDK 1.2 allows developers to create them, though they're still exclusive to Dev channel build.
In addition to the new widgets, Windows 11 build 25290 only brings a small change to the Start menu, particularly to the user menu. Microsoft is experimenting with a new UI that displays alerts for when you may need to take certain actions related to your account. For example, you may be prompted to create a backup of your data using OneDrive.
That's about it in terms of user-facing changes, but there is also the usual slew of fixes. Notably, Microsoft has fixed an issue that prevented Arm64 devices from being able to update to a new build. Here's the full list:
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We fixed the issue causing Arm64 devices to fail to resume from sleep/hibernate when running Build 25281 and getting stuck at the OS boot logo.
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Fixed an issue where some Insiders may have issues accessing websites and other resources via VPN connections. If you used the workaround documented in this forum post, please reverse those changes once you have this new build installed.
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Fixed an issue causing some Insiders to experience freezes when using the browser and certain other apps in recent Dev Channel builds.
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Fixed an explorer.exe crash which could cause the taskbar not to load for some Insiders.
The fixes only apply for Windows Insiders who received one of the different treatments for how search looks on the taskbar that began rolling out to Insiders with Build 25252:
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Fixed an issue where the search box would randomly disappear sometimes when you clicked it (leaving a blank space on the taskbar).
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Fixed an issue where the search box was shifting to the side slightly when you clicked it.
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Fixed an issue where the data content area of the Processes page might flash once when theme changes were applied in the Task Manager Settings page.
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Fixed an issue where some dialogs did not render in the correct theme when applied from Task Manager Settings page.
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Fixed an issue where properties in the Memory section of the Performance page were getting truncated even though there was space to display them.
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Reduced the transparency of graph colors in the Performance page, and adjusted the borders, to help make them stand out more.
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Fixed a few issues causing Task Manager crashes.
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Typing F in the search box should work again now.
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You now shouldn’t have to make Task Manager be as wide before the navigation pane appears.
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If text scaling has been increased, the search box shouldn’t overlap with the title bar text anymore.
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Made some tweaks to address cases where text in dialogs was getting cut off when text scaling was increased.
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Fixes an issue where certain parts of the title bar couldn’t be used to drag the window.
The following fixes only apply for Windows Insiders who received one of the different treatments of Windows Spotlight that began rolling out to Insiders with Build 25281:
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We fixed the issue causing some people to not get a consistent refresh of images on a daily basis.
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Fixed an issue where the preview for Sans Serif Collection in Personalization > Fonts was displaying broken glyphs.
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Fixed an issue that was preventing Narrator from announcing dropdown lists in Excel.
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Fixed an underlying issue which could cause Snipping Tool screenshots to become stretched out and distorted in the last few builds if you had multiple monitors.
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Fixed an issue which could cause a bugcheck with SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION.
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Fixed an issue which could make the Open With dialog crash on launch.
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Fixed an issue where the Open File dialog would hang if you clicked it while using an IME after having selected “Choose an app on your PC” from the Open With dialog.
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Fixed an issue which could cause Group Policy Editor to unexpectedly show “An error has occurred in the script on this page” with an invalid character error when editing a group policy.
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If you have OpenSSH Server set to start at boot (instead of manual), that preference should be remembered across OS upgrades now. Please note, you need to be on a build with this fix before it will take effect with your next upgrade.
There are some known issues as well, as you'd expect with any preview build. Here's what you need to be aware of:
[General]
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[NEW] The Update history page under Settings > Windows Update > Update history is blank for some users after installing Build 25290. This will be fixed via a newer Update Stack Package delivered via Windows Update when available.
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[NEW[ Investigating reports that some Insiders are experiencing repeated bugchecks after upgrading to Build 25284.
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[NEW] Launching Group Policy Editor may show an error about a displayName attribute not being found.
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Using Windows Hello to sign in with facial recognition may not work on Arm64 PCs. A workaround for this is to use the Hello PIN path.
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Some users are experiencing longer than expected update times installing recent builds. We are actively investigating this issue.
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[NEW] The link for “Find more widgets” in the widgets picker currently is broken. This will be fixed and linked to the Store collection here in a future update.
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Third-party widgets may occasionally disappear from the widgets board. They can be re-added by clicking refresh or by re-pinning them from the widgets picker.
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Third-party widgets may occasionally get unpinned when the Microsoft account is used to sign-in multiple Windows 11 devices.
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The undo button on the widget pinned/unpinned toast notification sometimes doesn’t work.
[Taskbar & System Tray]
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[NEW] App icons on the taskbar may appear on the wrong monitor for some Insiders with multiple monitors.
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The taskbar is sometimes cropped in half when using the tablet-optimized taskbar. You may also see this issue on secondary monitors.
[Search on the Taskbar]
The following known issues only apply for Windows Insiders who received one of the different treatments for how search looks on the taskbar that began rolling out to Insiders with Build 25252:
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There is an issue where you will be unable to change taskbar search box to show as icon only via taskbar settings in some cases. To work around this issue, first change to a different option and then after, you should be able to choose to show as icon only.
[Windows Spotlight]
The following known issues only apply for Windows Insiders who received one of the different treatments of Windows Spotlight that began rolling out to Insiders with Build 25281:
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Clicking on a secondary monitor does not dismiss the full screen experience.
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Spotlight wallpaper doesn’t show the correct resolution on multiple / mixed resolution monitors.
If you're enrolled in the Dev channel of the Insider program, you can grab the latest build right now by checking for updates in the Settings app. The new widgets don't require the latest build, though you will need to be running a relatively recent release.
Source: Microsoft
