[ryanbr]

Follow-up to #2311, which swapped Today's hero gauges from liquid vessels to GlowRing arcs.

The rings are the better default and stay the default. But @andigandhi asked on #2311 whether the vessels could be kept as a choice, and that is a fair ask: the liquid look was something people picked NOOP for. This keeps both, with the new look as what everyone gets unless they say otherwise.

The preference

noop.todayRingGauges, default true, toggled beside "Reduce motion in NOOP" in Settings, in the ordinary display section rather than an experimental one, since neither option is a prototype.

It is deliberately not Apple's noop.liquidTodayEnabled. That key picks between two whole Today SCREENS on iOS (LiquidTodayView vs TodayView); this picks a gauge inside the single Android one. Sharing one key would bind two unrelated meanings together and make a later divergence on either platform quietly wrong. I said as much on #2311 and the code comment records it, so the next person to look does not "unify" them.

What branches

Three gauge sites: the hero, the 26dp vital row, and the 30dp card row. Both renderings take the same bindings (same fraction, same value, same value-sampled tint), so whichever is on agrees with every other surface showing the metric.

Two things the vessel needs that the ring does not, and both had to be restored rather than left at their defaults:

onTap. The vessel's animated render owns a clickable that CONSUMES the touch, so a clickable parent never sees a tap landing on it. That was #1995, and it is why #2311 could move the handlers up to HeroRingColumn.onRingTap and drop the forwarding entirely. With the vessel selectable again the forwarding comes back, for that rendering only. The two small sites pass animated = false, which attaches no clickable, so a tap reaches the parent by itself and they need nothing.

The empty-hero cost gate. The vessels ran static until the row had a real score, so a brand-new user's launch churn was not fighting four live canvases: Android's equivalent of the iOS dataLoaded gate on HeroScoreCell. #2311 removed that line along with the vessels, and my first pass here let it fall back to animated = true. Reduce Motion poses the vessels still regardless, so the miss would only have surfaced on a fresh install with motion ON, which is the worst moment to find it. GlowRing needs no equivalent: it springs once to its target and then sits still.

Strings

Two, added to all 8 Android locales, translated rather than English echoes. Keys minted with the standard l10n_<screen>_<slug>_<sha1[:8]> algorithm.

Verification

• compileFullDebugKotlin clean (the two warnings in TodayScreen.kt are pre-existing and in untouched regions).
• Full Android suite --no-build-cache --rerun-tasks: 733 classes, 6259 tests, 0 failures, XML mtime checked against the clock. Main's baseline is 732/6256, so the delta is exactly the one new class and its three tests.
• i18n_audit.py --ci origin/main --platform android: green. No new hardcoded literals, no new English-only translations, no new locale gaps.
• doc_comment_lint.py: clean.

Three tests pin the preference. The load-bearing one is the absent-key case: an install that has never opened Settings has to get rings, because a pref defaulting the other way would silently undo a shipped change for everyone who upgrades, and reading a key nobody has written is the state most installs are in.

Not covered by the suite: the vessel rendering itself is a Compose canvas, so the visual result and the restored tap behaviour want a look on a device before this lands.