Last year when Apple introduced widgets I was excited because widgets have become stale and a forgotten feature on Android by developers. I thought for sure iOS developers would breathe new life into them and make them become relevant again. Sadly this hasn't been the case at all. Instead there's just a few widgets available from the apps I use everyday - mostly Apple's stock widgets. Very few 3rd party developers have even bothered to push out a widget. Are widgets dead in 2022? Do iPhone users even use them or care about them?
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Current State of Widgets
- Thread starter rockitdog
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- ios16widgets widgets
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In my opinion, they were dead the minute Apple released them. They are just yet another half-Rsed attempt at bringing in new features. They are entirely useless, they don’t update frequently enough. They are not interactive, need we say more?
I wish there was a decent weather widget on the home screen, like Android had (has?). It was nice to look down at my phone and know if I had time to get outdoors without launching an app. It was quick and to the point.
Not a fan of a widget-specific screen, like Apple's implementation.
Not a fan of a widget-specific screen, like Apple's implementation.
Well, unproven but I'd add that a quite a few people on the thread discussing iOS 16 battery drain right now are suspicious that certain widgets such as weather on the lock screen are impacting battery life so you could add at least the suspicion that Apple's implementation is not well implemented and/or buggy in terms of efficient battery use is concerned.
I quite like a few widgets e.g. calendar on my home screen and battery on my swipe-left-to-right from home screen page plus I also use a bit of a cheat on that page by having a shortcut widget that gives me 4 buttons to launch things like Settings and some other basics from that "screen to the left of the home screen" page. Apart from that though I'm purging most of my widgets from my various screens because I do think they are putting a drain on my battery life.