Then long-press on the Widgetsmith widget, tap Edit Widget, and select your creation. Select Widgetsmith, then the size of the widget you want to place. And then to get your new widget(s) actually on your home screen, close out of the Widgetsmith app and head to your widget options by doing the app-jiggle-plus-sign dance.

To keep better track of which widget is which, you can hit Tap to Rename in the top-center of your display.

Once you’re satisfied with how a widget has come together, tap Save in the upper-right corner. You can even set restrictions so that specific widgets only appear at certain times. And again, that’s just for the time and date! You can spend hours tapping to perfect how that one widget looks, and then do it all over again to apply the same fastidiousness to all the other Widgetsmith categories. But if you tap on the medium version, say, then tap Default Widget, you can choose among 11 presentational styles of varying information density, 13 fonts, 14 tint colors (applied to the numbers and letters inside the widget), 30 background colors, and 15 border colors. You can obviously choose between small, medium, and large. Take Widgetsmith’s time and date options alone. But it’s the manifold ways you can customize each of those widgets that will send you spiraling down the rabbit hole. (Know ahead of time that Weather and Tides require a subscription of $2 per month or $20 per year, and that features like Health and Photos require handing over potentially sensitive permissions to the app.) So far, so simple. If you install Widgetsmith, it’ll generate widgets across eight categories for you: Weather, Calendar, World Time, Reminders, Health, Astronomy, Tides, and Photos. (My Smart Stack included a pretty comprehensive, even redundant smörgåsbord of Weather, Calendar, Photos, Apple TV+, Google, and DuckDuckGo.) You can chose among three sizes again, and iOS 14 will plug in whatever widgets make the most sense for that time of day. To let Apple handle the selection process for you, go ahead and make your apps jiggle, hit the plus sign in the upper left corner, and tap Smart Stack. For that, the fix is to use a stack, which layers like-sized widgets on top of each other so you can swipe through them instead of each taking up its own space. You can change the location that the Weather and Clock apps pull from, for instance, but otherwise there’s not much worth mentioning yet.Īs you start to accumulate widgets, and displaced apps continue to domino to further screens, things may start to feel untidy again. It’s a mixed bag in terms of how many offer that option, and the ones that do have pretty limited utility. You can edit some widgets as well, by long-pressing them and tapping Edit Widget. Caution: The following contains prolific use of the word jiggle. Here’s a guide to whether widgets are right for you (probably) and how to get started with them (easily). No matter how you choose to widget, it’s a way to make your iPhone a little more useful at a glance, and a lot more customized to your specific needs. Combine them with the iOS Shortcuts feature, and you can even go full Infinity Wars. You can download third-party apps that open the door to TikTok virality. You can edit them, move them, and stack them to your heart’s content. Widgets are welcome anywhere, across a wide range of apps in a variety of sizes. On iOS, not so much, outside of a modest implementation in the iPhone and iPad’s “Today View,” the neglected territory you get to by swiping right from your home or lock screen. If you’ve ever had an Android phone, you’ve likely tinkered with widgets before. The addition of mighty widgets in iOS 14, though, lets you break out of that rut for the first time, well, ever. Your apps line up in tidy rows, you swipe until you remember which screen you put Disney+ on, repeat 80 times a day or so. But over decades of refinement, it’s also gotten a little boring. Your iPhone is capable, reliable, and sturdy-as long as you don’t drop it again on that one corner that keeps cracking.

Ios 15 home screen layout ideas