A lot of people on Apple Discussions, Reddit, here, and other places have complained about these three widgets, either saying that they don't work as expected or not knowing which widget is supposed to display which event. In other words, the three widgets are a freakin' mess.
I hope by creating this relatively straight-forward table, I can help others quickly see which widget displays what, and how they can be improved.
As you already know, there are several types of events used by Calendar and Reminders apps. They are:
- Birthdays
- Holidays
- All-Day Events
- Specific Time Events
- Location Events
- Messaging Events
The two types that are used the most are All-Day Events and Specific Time Events. And so, this post is about them, and they happen to be the most problematic ones. All events can be further divided into two types: today and future (aka tomorrow).
All-day events on iPhone have been a baffling and nonsensical mystery since the dawn of time. The problem is that Apple never considered them proper events, and because of that, all-day events don't play nicely with widgets. What's even more bizarre is that 24-hour events, on the other hand (which are all-day events by definition), have zero issues with widgets and are displayed perfectly.
First, let's look at the three widgets and what they display. Calendar widget displays only events from Calendar app, and similarly, Reminders widget displays only events from Reminders app. Up Next widget, on the other hand, displays events from both Calendar and Reminders apps. Reminders widget is just like Calendar widget in that it displays ONLY today events. Up Next widget displays ONLY tomorrow events as well as today events with an upcoming specific time.
Now look at the table. Each type of event is supposed to have at least ONE green checkmark, which means that at least ONE widget is capable of displaying said event. What do you see? That's right, all-day tomorrow events have ZERO green checkmarks, which means that NO widget is capable of displaying them, which also means that they are a problem. And Apple can and should fix it.
The fix is simple: Up Next widget should display ALL tomorrow events, not just specific time tomorrow events. It should display both all-day and specific time tomorrow events.
Apologies for turning this post into a thesis. It's a shame that something as basic as iPhone widgets is complicated by Apple's stubbornness to fix the obvious.
