With iOS14, Apple has reactivated the iPhone's home screen with a new tool to make it more convenient and organized A large part of it is the new treatment of the widget — a snippet of information that previously lived on today's page on the left side of the home screen

The widget was introduced in iOS10, but was always disturbed by the lack of modularity and Apple's counterintuitive philosophy

Thankfully, iOS14's new approach to widgets seems to be improving in every way Coupled with Apple's other new home screen feature, the app library, the new widget interface will help ios14 bridge the gap with Android when it comes to personalization Oh, and they also look gorgeous

Here's a dive deep into the iOS14 widget overhaul, and how it makes your iPhone home screen better than ever

The most obvious change to the iOS14 widget is that it is now available on the same screen as the app, between apps, rather than being limited to your own page, which gives you flexibility in the structure of your home screen and allows you to place the most important front and center information in a glanceable and easily accessible space

The widget is also really easy to drag and drop on an existing home screen Just long press on any app, enter Jiggle mode (yes, that's what apple calls the editable state of the iOS home screen), and from there you can select the widget you like and drop it and all the other app icons will appear as new additions Float out of the way to make room for your home

Apps and widgets shake the same way they are used all the time on iOS in that they fill the available space in order and there is no gap between them, in other words, the home screen is completely different like Android because they can't leave empty space or have an entire empty page just to display the wallpaper It does not work

The widget has also been significantly upgraded in terms of appearance In today's iOS13, widgets are pretty boring to look at and generally have no color For example, the weather widget consumes a lot of space, but doesn't use it for a big effect, showing the current situation outdoors and the highs and lows of the day, without a more detailed hourly or weekly forecast

The iOS14 widget is beautiful by comparison They are much more colorful and visually interesting — at least those of Apple's first party - and come in various sizes to fit in a large number of layouts They can sit side by side and span 4 rows and columns, consuming 2x2 squares in the grid or dominating the entire page as needed

If there is a complaint that Apple should address before the release of iOS 14 is fully released, in the first developer beta, there seems to be no way to resize the widget once it has already been deployed This means that you cannot change from a 4x2 calendar widget to a 2x2 calendar widget if it already exists on the home screen Unlike Android, there is no handle to resize the widget, so you can remove an existing widget and then add another one to make it different Fortunately, if Apple is so inclined, this would seem to be easy enough to fix

Apple's approach to widgets in iOS14 is not particularly revolutionary, but just revolutionary for Ios — the smart stack is a really clever idea Smart Stack is literally a stack of widgets that you can swipe to access other apps in the same window With a swipe, the stack changes focus, going from Apple news to your calendar, to daily forecasts, for example

It's a nifty quirk in itself, but what makes Smart Stack really intelligent is that it dynamically changes focus all day, depending on context cues For example, when you wake up, the smart stack may be weather by default But by the time you start working, it shifts to your schedule for the day And when you go home, it turns into a small photo slideshow You can swipe through the stack to access information from other apps, but relevance-oriented makes this class of widgets particularly powerful

In addition, you can edit the smart stack to make sure that only the selected app is rotated, or you can swap one widget to another of the same size You can also create a stack from scratch by dragging and dropping it into the stack Just long press on the stack to add and remove apps, adjust settings for specific apps in the stack, or turn off smart rotationThis disables the intelligent context-based switching feature

Apple did not mention them during the release of iOS14, butサードパーティの開発者は確かに新しいウィジェットにアクセスできますexperienceIn In fact, if you look closely during the WWDC2020 keynote, you may have noticed a Nike widget or a word with a friend hiding among others

No third-party widgets currently exist - we have an iOS14 installed on one of our iphones, and at the moment we have a built-in Apple softwares hopefully by the time iOS14 is finally launched in the fall, a swath of popular apps will have new features that can truly take advantage of ios14's capabilities

It will be interesting to see how these third-party widgets are specifically integrated with the smart stack Apple isn't talking about what other developers can do with widgets, so at this stage, anyone who has been using the Smart Stacks context-based shuffle for a third-party sof

iPhone for a long time knows how important the iOS14 widget is The home screen interface of Apple's phone always felt outdated, as it was below expectations However, Cupertino said he learned a lot from developing the complexity of the apple Watch and gained insight into how to display a wealth of information within a relatively constrained space

Even at this early stage, iOS14's widgets look great, are intuitive to add and use, and Google has been using widgets on its own mobile OS for many years It has the richness that is missing from Android widgets because it is struggling to update the look and feel of the widget

All that said, there is still a month to go before Apple delivers iOS14 to the masses, so stay tuned, because the widget is even more powerful capabilities and new youth in the coming months