If you own a Pixel phone and never bothered with Pixel VIPs, you are not alone. The feature arrived with the June 2025 Pixel Drop but felt half-finished — until now. The September Pixel Drop finally fixed its biggest annoyances, and the widget is actually worth using.
Pixel VIPs lets you promote your closest contacts to an elevated tier, giving you a home screen widget with instant access to their details, recent conversations, shared location, and even their local weather — plus shortcuts to call or message them.
What Pixel VIPs Does and Why It Was Annoying Before
You choose VIPs in the Contacts app, and they appear on a home screen widget. From there, you can pull up a contact’s information page showing recent conversations, shared location, and local weather, with shortcuts to call or message.
VIPs are also automatically added to your “Favorites,” which excludes them from Do Not Disturb mode — handy for making sure calls from your most important people always get through. One quirk to know: all VIPs are favorites, but not all favorites are VIPs.
At launch, though, the experience was clunky. Tapping a contact from the widget slid up a small information card that you then had to swipe up again to see full details — an unnecessary extra step for something designed to be quick. Integration was also limited to Google’s own apps.
What the September Pixel Drop Fixed
Both problems are now addressed. Tapping a contact takes you directly to their full information page, no extra swipe needed. And alongside Google Messages, Meet, and Maps, WhatsApp has been added to the mix, making the widget genuinely useful for people whose conversations live outside Google’s ecosystem.
How to Set Up Pixel VIPs on Your Pixel Phone
Pixel VIPs lives in the Contacts app and is exclusive to Pixel phones. Open the Contacts app, switch to the “Organize” tab, scroll down, and select “Pixel VIPs.” After a brief introduction screen, tap “Next” and choose the contacts you want to promote. Then add the Pixel VIPs widget to your home screen for one-tap access to the people who matter most.
It took Google more than a year to get Pixel VIPs right, but with the latest update, this quiet feature finally earns its place on your home screen.
Pixel VIPs widget (Credits: How-To Geek)
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Source: How-To Geek — read the full story there.
