My Android phone offered to update to Android 9 today, so I said "sure!". It turns out Android 9 is pretty cool, but it adds a date banner to the top of the home screen, and a search box to the bottom. Both these widgets seem to depend on the Google Assistant app for their functionality, but I've disabled that app (I have quite enough Google in my life already, thank you) so they just sit there inert and immovable.

I guess I should be grateful that Google stuff can be disabled and the things that depend on it degrade more-or-less gracefully, but I'm a bit annoyed at the waste of screen real estate.