Apple at today’s WWDC 2020 online-only event introduced rich and proper widgets in iOS 14 for the Home screen of your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch — finally!
Although currently iOS 13 and earlier releases permit the user to press a Home screen icon like Camera or Notes with 3D Touch, or tap and hold it with Haptic Touch, for something that resembles a widget in the shortcuts menu, it’s not really a true widget in a sense that would permit you to interact with it, place it anywhere you want on the Home screen and so forth.
With iOS and iPadOS 14, iOS device owners can now drag any widget from the Today view and drop it onto any Home screen. Not only that, but you can simply resize the widget any way you like to fit your specific Home screen layout.
Widgets are available in various sizes and can also be added to the Home screen by tapping the plus sign, which pulls up a widgets gallery for quickly cycling through all of the widgets that are currently available on the device.
There’s another really cool new feature, a special smart widget.
When placed on the Home screen, you can swipe across it to go through all the available widgets and quickly settle on the one you want. Pairing widgets with Siri smarts has taken this even further because iOS’ on-device intelligence can optionally choose a different widget for your smart widget in the morning than in the evening, depending on how you use your device.
Today, widgets are currently available for many stock apps and come with many third-party apps. Widgets are so popular on Android because they’re lightweight, can be interacted with and give users an at-a-glance overview of snippets of information, such as the current weather or the status of your shipment, without needing to launch any special apps.
And that’s the new Home screen widgets feature in iOS and iPadOS 14.
Who’s liking it so far? Let us know in the comments down below!