A Better Widget
Widgets in iOS 14 change more than layouts…
As someone who rather obsesses over the organization of my iPhone home screen (as you can see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), it seems like iOS 14 may be by far the biggest change to the operating system yet. For 13 years, we’ve lived with a grid of apps. Now that grid is getting shoved to the side and down and pushed all around to make room for widgets. Finally.
Yes, yes “Android already did it”. But who cares? I don’t use an Android phone, so I care little if another OS did it first. Though I am curious what learnings can be gleaned from those first-mover users, as even just a few days in, it seems like there’s a greenfield of opportunity for iOS with widgets.
And, of course, widgets aren’t exactly brand new on iOS either. They’ve been around for a few years, but were relegated to the left-hand drawer. Oddly, they still are stuck there with iPad OS 14, which makes basically no sense.¹ But with iOS 14, again, they’re given the room to breathe and they’ve been revamped to make you want to showcase them.
I’ve actually been using the iOS 14 betas for a while so I’ve had a bit of time day-to-day with the widgets. But those were only the Apple-built ones. Some are great, like Calendar. Others are in a way, slightly less useful, like Stocks, because you can’t expand them as you could in the previous version of the widgets. We get it: this is because space is so precious on homescreens and you have your grid of apps to consider.
But with iOS 14 now officially out in the wild, the third-party apps are coming fast and furious. The fantastic Weather Line widget was the first one I got to try. And some surprising other developers are making early entries, such as a little shop called Google. Their search widget with one-tap text, visual, voice, or incognito search feels like the perfect use of the space. So much so that it makes me wonder if some services may pop up that are widget-first…
TechCrunch has a good rundown of some of the early entrants. A few others are listed in the replies to my tweet here.
Unsurprisingly, a few widget-focused apps are already blowing up on the App Store. That is actually an understatement. Currently, the top three apps in the App Store are simple widget showcase apps. Yes, overall. Yes, beating Zoom and the threatened-to-be-banned-shortly TikTok. After a decade-plus of grid confinement, I would say that interest is quite high here…
Update 9/21: Though the widgets — or rather, Apple’s implementation of them — are not without their issues…
¹ The best (only) explanation I’ve heard is that because of the homescreen rotation element of the iPad, widgets are far more complicated on that device than they may appear. That would make it seem like they won’t be coming until iPad OS 15, sadly.
