When I first discussed iOS 14 on June 23, 2020, I guessed that the new widgets feature would be one of the more noticeable improvements. What I didn't realize was how popular it would become and how I much I would enjoy the feature. People like me who use their devices to be productive are finding lots of great uses. And folks who just want to change the appearance of their iPhone are also loving this feature, evidenced by all of the pictures I'm seeing of creative iPhone screens and the buzz surrounding them. For example, when Kat Mogus posted a short video on TikTok to show how she was using the fantastic Widgetsmith app to create what she says is her "aesthetic af" pink homescreen, it went viral and already has 3.5 million hearts. It also helped to push David Smith's Widgetsmith app to the #1 spot on the App Store. If you haven't started to explore the widgets feature yet, I encourage you to do so because I find that it makes my iPhone and iPad even more useful in my law practice. Plus, widgets are fun.
Creating a widget
Apple has a helpful page on its website that explains how to create, edit, and delete widgets. In short, you press down on an empty area of the screen to get into "jiggle mode" where you can move apps around. In that mode, you will see a plus sign at the top left corner. Tap the plus sign to bring up a screen with some suggested widgets at the top followed by a list of all of your apps that have been updated to take advantage of iOS 14 widgets. You can simply browse to find something useful or use the search bar at the top to search for something specific.
For example, let's say that you want to place a calendar widget from the built-in Calendar app. Tap on Calendar and this brings up a screen where you can see each of the possible sizes of the widget. In this case, there is a 2x2, a 2x4, and a 4x4. Tap on one of them, and then drag it to your home screen.
You can either place a widget in its own space on your home screen or you can place a widget on top of another widget in a stack — more on that below.
Making space for widgets
If you are like me, you have considered the 24 app spaces on your first home screen to be prime real estate, second in importance only to the four apps that live at the bottom of all of your home screens. So at first, I was reluctant to place even the smallest 2x2 widget on my screen because I didn't want to give up four different apps for just a single widget. But I soon realized that I was wrong to be clinging to my old ways. Here is why.
First, when you place a widget for an app on your home screen, you really don't need the app icon any more. For example, if you place the Calendar widget on your home screen and you tap it, it will launch the Calendar app. Place a widget for a to do app and you no longer need that app icon on the main screen. Thus, you are taking up the space of at least four app icons, but you no longer need one of those app icons on the home screen.
Second, as noted above, you can stack multiple widgets. If you stack four widgets in a 4x4 widget space, you are using the same screen real estate that the four apps themselves would have used. You can switch between the widgets in a stack by just swiping up or down on the stack.
Third, I realized that it really wasn't that hard for me to select a number of apps that used to be on my first home screen that worked just as well on my second screen. For example, on my iPhone, there are apps like Dropbox and Facebook and eero and Files that I do use frequently, but it isn't really a big hassle to swipe over once to a second screen to get to them. The slight inconvenience is outweighed by the usefulness of using widgets on the first screen, as discussed below. Plus, it has given me a new reason to go to the second screen of my iPhone, which is now a perfect place for me to place even more widgets — or, for now, one of the large 4x4 widgets. As for the apps that used to be on my second screen, they are now on my third (and final) screen organized into folders. The apps that are not important enough to be on any of those three screens are now on hidden screens. If I want to use any of lesser-used apps, I use the new App Library feature of iOS 14 to keep track of all of those.
Note that I'm only talking about screen real estate for the iPhone because, unfortunately, you cannot currently place a widget on the main portion of an iPad screen. They have to live on the left side of the screen, which means that there is actually less space for widgets on a large iPad screen than on a small iPhone screen. And that just makes no sense. I still find widgets to be incredibly useful on the iPad, but with all of the additional space on the iPad screen I would love to be able to place widgets anywhere, just like the iPhone. This is so obvious that I have to imagine that Apple is working on adding this in a future update to iPadOS.
The usefulness of widgets
Now here comes the fun part: using widgets to improve your life. I love widgets because they display the useful information that I need the most, often making it unnecessary to open up the app to get the information that I need. For most widgets, you get to select what information is displayed, so the information that you see is the information that is most useful to you.
For example, although I sometimes use the built-in Calendar app, I prefer to use Fantastical (an app I most recently discussed in this post), and it has some great widgets. There are currently 12 different widgets to choose from. In the smallest 2x2 size you can get choose to see what is up next, a list of upcoming events, the entire month, or just today's date (in two possible formats). Larger widget sizes can display even more information.
I use Things to keep track of my “to do” list for work — the motions, appeals, discovery, and other projects that I am working on. The 2x2 version of the Things widgets is big enough to display the three items at the top of my list, which are the items that I am most likely to be working on each day. I find it very useful that when I am on my home screen I am gently reminded of the most important tasks for me to be working on.
Another app with fantastic widgets is Carrot Weather (which I reviewed in 2018). It has twelve widgets. These widgets update throughout the day to show you the weather, and if you pay for a Tier 3 subscription, there is a widget that shows a weather radar so you can see if rainclouds are close. The Carrot app also has an optional personality. It can be serious and just give you the facts, or you can turn on the snarky feature for the app to provide silly (and often timely) comments along with the weather.
The built-in Photos app has three widgets in 2x2, 2x4, or 4x4 sizes, which display a special moment selected by the Memories part of the Photos app. The photo selected changes throughout the day, and it often brings a smile to my face to glance at a picture of my kids when they were younger (and cuter!) as I am doing work on my iPhone. If you want more control over photos, the Widgetsmith app will rotate through pictures that are within a specific album in the Photos app. Thus, you can use Widgetsmith to display a picture of your spouse, child, pet., etc. that changes over time – whatever you make the subject of one of your albums.
Any of these widgets would be useful on their own, but as I mentioned above, if you drag a widget on top of another one, you can create a stack of widgets. As I noted above, you can swipe up and down to manually swap through the widgets in a stack. Better yet, if you hold down your finger on a stack for a second or two, you will see an option to edit the the stack and use the Smart Rotate feature. (You can also use that feature to rearrange or delete widgets in a stack.)
The Smart Rotate feature is one of the best part of widgets. Throughout the day, the iPhone rotates the widgets with Smart Rotate turned on, often trying to show you the widget that might be most useful at that point in the day. I love this feature because I look at my iPhone and iPad home screen frequently, and over a relatively short period of time as the widgets rotate I end up seeing all of the widgets in a stack. Thus, in a 2x2 space that would normally be devoted to four static app icons that need to be tapped to see any useful information, a 2x2 widget gives me a way to launch an of the four apps while also showing me useful (or fun) information that often makes it unnecessary to launch the app. By frequently seeing information such as my upcoming schedule and the weather, with some pictures thrown in to give me an occasional smile, the space that used to hold four static app icons is now making me much more productive and happy.
For example, I currently have the Fantastical widget and the Things widget in a single stack. As they switch back and forth throughout the day, I get subtle reminders of what is coming up and what I should be working on. With just two widgets in a stack, if the one that I want to see is not currently being displayed, it just takes a quick swipe to see the other one. And then I can tap on either one to launch the Fantastical or the Things app.
Speaking of Smart Rotate, there is a similar feature if you use the Widgetsmith app. That app lets you choose from a large variety of information to display — in lots of different styles, fonts, colors, etc. — and then you can have the information displayed in the widget change based upon the time of day. That's a neat idea that other developers should copy. Carrot Weather already does; for the 2x4 widgets that I display on my iPad, in the morning it shows me the hourly temperature for the next few hours, but at the end of the day it shows me the daily temperature for the next few days.
You cannot interact with the items displayed on the widget. For example, for the Fantastical widget, I simply see my calendar items, and tapping anywhere on the widget launches the app so that I can dig deeper in the app itself. But there is currently one exception: the Shortcuts app. Although the 2x2 version of the widget is used to launch one specific shortcut, the 2x4 widget lists four shortcuts and the 4x4 widget contains eight shortcuts. It selects the shortcuts from whatever folder you select, so within the Shortcuts app, you can create a folder called “widgets” and place the four or eight shortcuts that you want in there. It is very useful to launch a shortcut and start using it directly from the home screen. I’m currently using a 4x4 Shortcuts widget on my second home screen so that I can launch 8 shortcuts — the last one of which is a simply shortcut that simply launches the Shortcuts app, making it unnecessary for me to have a Shortcuts icon on my homescreen.
I'm still trying to decide what shortcuts to place on that large widget. I recommend that, for one of the shortcut slots, you include a shortcut to launch Shortcuts, making it unnecessary to have the Shortcuts app on your home screen.
It's not all good news. I'm currently working through a bug that one of my widgets will work when launched within the Shortcuts app but doesn't work when launched from the widget. I'm still not sure if the fault lies with me or with Apple on that bug. Nevertheless, it is already obvious that the Shortcuts widget is one of the most powerful widgets.
Conclusion
The widgets feature has fundamentally changed the way that I interact with my iPhone homescreen. It is probably the most significant thing to happen to the primary screen of my phone since I started using an iPhone in the first place. And these are early days. Many popular apps have not yet been updated to support widgets, and those that have are likely to have even better widgets in the future as we all figure out what is best about this feature. Moreover, the ability to create widgets will cause folks to create new apps that did not exist before. Widgetsmith itself is a perfect example, and as I was writing this post, I learned of a new app called Scribblet that lets you write something — a handwritten to-do list, a drawing, an inspirational quote, etc. — and have it display in a widget. Sribblet itself may not be my cup of tea, but it demonstrates that developers are coming up with new ideas to exploit what widgets can do. And finally, there is Apple itself, which I'm sure will improve widgets in the future — such as, hopefully, allowing widgets to be placed anywhere on an iPad screen. Suffice it to say that widgets are already great, this feature is certain to become even better in the future.
