Widgets not updating anymore

Question

Since a couple of days/weeks, I noticed that my widgets aren't updating anymore on my home screens of my Nexus 6 (Android 6.0.1). It's not related to a single widget, it's all of them. I haven't found a single one that updates at the moment. I have several widgets that should update regularly: chats, weather, Google Fit, call logs etc; and none of them is updating.

When I reboot my phone, it updates the widgets one time, and that's that. Afterwards no more updates.

For example, I have the widget for Google Fit on my home screen, and it is still showing the status from a couple of days ago; when I rebooted my phone.

I tried the Android N beta some time ago (I can't remember if the widgets updated then though). But because there were some problems with applications I use daily, I reverted back to my old Android 6.0.1 build. This revert includes a factory reset. So I tried the factory reset solution. But I'm guessing the Android N beta has nothing to do with my problem?

Are there some things I can try? Are there some settings that I could have executed that froze my widgets? Maybe something with battery optimizations or something?

I don't have to mention to you that widgets that aren't updating are very annoying.

As I already mentioned, I'm using a Motorola Nexus 6 with stock Android 6.0.1 on it. I have all the latest version of the Android version for my phone, and have installed all security patches. Including the July security patch from a couple of days ago.

Update: I'm using the stock Android launcher. I don't have any special applications running that should customize my battery behaviour (like Greenify).

— ndsmyter | Sources

Answer

Possible solutions you could try if you have the same problem as me (as mentioned by rajatpunkstaa; I just repeat them to be complete but give a vote up there too):

Make sure any battery saving apps are disabled. Or at least aren't interfering with the widgets;

Try to clear the data of the launcher. Best is to delete both cache and app data.

But in the end, this didn't work for me. So I got into the Android widget documentation to find out what made the widgets tick. Or in my case, why they didn't tick.
So I found out, that one widget can actually block the updating of the other widgets. Not on purpose, but by accident.

So by adding every widget seperately, with a lot of time in between, I could notice that the problem occurred after a while. The time in between was rather important, because if I did it immediately there was no problem. But after a time the widget would probably crash or something (not visible though), and other widgets stopped too.

So the best solution for me was:

Remove all widgets;

Add about one widget a day (giving the faulty widget time to crash);

As soon as you see the widgets misbehaving, you know the culprit widget; probably the one you last added.

Some tips on this solution:

Best to take a widget that updates regularly as the first widget. So you have an idea when something goes wrong really soon;

For some reason the stock clock widget keeps working, even though the other widgets stopped working. So probably that widget uses a different updating mechanism or something.

— ndsmyter | Sources

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