One of the ideas we kind of explored with elementary OS but never really iterated on was “widgets” as mini apps that use existing window manager hints combined with special treatment from the window manager.

I feel like there is a *lot* we could do similarly and better on GNOME, for example, around always-on-top, on-all-workspace, always-on-bottom, etc.

Android’s picture-in-picture, for example, is “just” a tiny view of an app with some toolkit helpers, then the system UI does the rest.