10 Tips For Using iPhone Home Screen Widgets

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some tips for using Widgets on your iPhone in iOS 14. 

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So Widgets is a great new feature of iOS 14 that allows you to add more information and functionality to your Home Screen pages. First let me show you the basics. If you want to add a widget to a Home Screen go to that Home Screen, tap and Hold in a blank area and then you enter Editing mode. Then tap the Plus button at the top and now you can add a widget. You'll see a variety of different widgets that you can add. If you go all the way to the bottom you actually see them listed by app. So you could pick an app, like say the Clock app, then you could flip through a variety of different widgets that you can add. Then tap the Add Widget button. This adds the widget here to the Home Screen. In addition to adding it there if you Exit editing mode but then tap and Hold the widget you usually get an option to edit the widget. This allows you to specify things. For instance, here this widget was four clocks and I can tap anyone of these and set a new location for it. 

So the first tip I'm going to show you is that you can use widgets on the Home Screen but also on the Widget Screen. The Widget Screen was around before iOS 14. It's what you see when you're on the first Home Screen page and you swipe left to right. You go to the Widget Screen in here. You've got widgets here and you also have widgets here on your Home Screen. You could move them back and forth between those. So I can tap and Hold on this widget and then I could select Edit Home Screen and now I can drag this widget over to the widget screen here. I can leave it there. You could also tap and drag a widget from here and move it back to the Home Screen. 

Now when you go to add a widget a special type of widget you can add is called a Smart Stack. You'll probably see it here at the top but you could also scroll down to the list and then tap Smart Stack there. You could choose from the three different sizes here. Let's choose this size and add a Smart Stack. So a Smart Stack has various different pages. You could see here the dots on the right side. So, in regular mode here I can flip through the different items in Smart Stack. If I tap and Hold the widget I have the ability to Edit the Stack. This shows me a list of items here. Now the first item is Smart Rotate. What that will do is your iPhone will try to determine which one to show you at any given time. It will look at the time of day and your behavior and some other things to figure that out. If you'd rather have it just stay on the last widget shown just turn off Smart Rotate and it will stay there until you change the widget.

Now one of the types of widget you can have in here, and I've got this one, is called Siri Suggestions, and you could see here if I go in and Edit the Stack it shows me Siri Suggestions as the first one. This will show you various different actions that your iPhone thinks you want to do right now. But if it doesn't get it right you could always tap and Hold any of those actions and there will be a suggestion and there will be a Suggest Less item. So I can tell it, yeah I usually don't want to see the weather so let's suggest that less and show me some other suggestion instead. Now in a Smart Stack you can go in and Edit it and you can set the order for things. So I can make Siri suggestions go down in a list. I can bring News up under Weather. I can set exactly what order I want these to be in. I could also remove items. If I simply swipe right to left I'll get a Delete for any of those items. So I can Delete Siri Suggestions from the Smart Stack and maybe also Photos. Now adding to the Smart Stack is a little trickier. What you need to do to do that is Add a new widget to the Home Screen. So let's go into Widgets here and let's say I want to add a Clock widget. So I'll select Clocks here. I want to make sure I choose a widget that is the same size as the Stack. So it's going to be this size here. I'll add the widget. So now you could see I've got both widgets there. This is just a widget by itself. This is a Stack. Let me drag this widget into the Stack and now I've added it there. Now let me Exit editing mode. Tap and Hold this widget and I can Edit the Stack and I could see Clocks have been added in there. I can set its position.

This is going to allow you to do some interesting things. For instance you can add the same widget over and over again to a Stack. As an example let's do that for a Stack that's just all stock quotes. So I'll go into Edit mode here. I'll use the Plus button and I'll look for Stocks. I'll go into there and let me go over and there is a special symbol widget where I can have a single symbol. So let's add that widget here. Now you can see I've got a widget for a single symbol. Now let's go and add another one. The same thing again. So I'll go in here, I'll go over to symbol, and I'll add this widget. So now I have two widgets like this. I could drag one on top of the other and now I've added them and created a Stack. Let's go and add a third one and I'll use the same symbol widget and I'll drag that one into the Stack. So now I've got three pages in that Stack. I can flip through these and they're all going to show me the Dow Jones. But if I tap and Hold one of them I can Edit the symbol and change it to something else. So let's select Apple for this one. Then I can go to the next one and let's tap and Hold and Edit that one and set the symbol there to another stock and then let's go to the third one and let's manually enter in a stock symbol here. Now I've got this little Stack here that allows me to flip through some stocks. You could do the same thing with a set of Clock widgets or maybe weather with different locations for each widget inside the Stack. 

Now if you like using widgets what you going to want to do is go to the App Store and search for widgets. You're going to come up with a lot of different apps that are widget makers. You can go in and make special widgets usually with things like information or the weather, the date, the time. Bits of things like that. There's a whole bunch of different ones to choose from. So you could pick one that looks good to you and now you have a whole bunch more widgets that you can add to your Home Screens and into the Stacks. But also some regular apps may have widgets as well. As an example the Wikipedia app, which is free, adds widgets. Let's go and try to add a Wikipedia widget here. Let's Add A New Widget. You can see it's even suggesting it here at the top. Or I can scroll all the way down to the bottom and you could see it here in the list of apps. There's are variety of different widgets here. I've got three different sizes for Picture of the Day, I've got On This Day widgets, and I've got Top Read widgets. So I can select one of those. Let's do the very first one here for a little picture. Add that widget here and now I get a Picture of the Day widget. It just looks nice on my Home screen but if I want more information I can tap that and it will then take me to that picture in the Wikipedia app. 

So if you have the Shortcuts app and you like creating shortcuts you can add a Shortcuts widget that's really useful. So let's go in. Add a new widget here and I'll scroll down all the way to Shortcuts. Let's add that. There's a small widget that's just going to activate a single shortcut. But you could also do a group of four or a group of eight. Let's add this one here and it's going to add four different shortcuts here. Now if I tap on any of those it will run that shortcut. But if I tap in the middle there and Hold I could Edit the widget. One of the things I could do is choose a Folder. So the Shortcuts app now allows you to create a Folder. So I can create a folder and I've done that. Created a folder called Widget Shortcuts. I have placed a bunch of different shortcuts in that folder in the Shortcuts app. It's just an organizational feature. So you don't have just one huge list of Shortcuts. But you can then use that to choose a group of Shortcuts so now I have specific shortcuts that are going to appear here. Like one that will just start playing PodCasts. Another one that will turn on Do Not Disturb. One that opens the Camera app and another that sends a specific message to a person. Now I can just tap anyone of these on my Home Screen and it will run that shortcut.

So you can really, not only customize the information that you see on your Home Screen, but also actions that you can perform on your Home Screen using the Shortcuts widget. I could actually create like three different folders each with four shortcuts in them, add three shortcut widgets to a single stack, and then I could flip through three pages showing a total of twelve different shortcuts right here on my Home Screen that I could run just by tapping them.

Now one last tip. You can use Shortcuts to completely replace Apps on your Home Screen. So my main home screen has a bunch of apps on it. But there is nothing to stop me from adding all these shortcuts there. So I'll tap and Hold in a blank area and let's drag this widget to the first page. Let's drag this one to the first page as well. This one to the first page and finally this one to the first page. Now you can see my main Home Screen actually has no apps on it except the ones at the bottom. It just has all these widgets. The second page now has all of those app icons. But if I tap and Hold and then tap down here where I see the dots I can turn off the second and third pages. Now all I have is a single Home Page and all that has on it is widgets. So whenever I use the Home Button I go to this screen which has everything I need on it and if I swipe over because I've hid all those other Home Screens it just takes me right to the App Library. So I have a screen with my widgets on it and then the very next screen has all my apps in the App Library.

So I hope you found these tips for using widgets on your iPhone useful. Let me know what your favorite widget creation apps and third party app that now have widgets in them are in the comments below.