Widgets Are Going to Revolutionize iOS

Like many longtime Apple fans, I await WWDC week with eager anticipation.

What will the newest, coolest features be? What can we infer about the future of Apple platforms? And, for us programmers, what wonky features have been added to the Swift language and SwiftUI framework?

But, in my day job as a startup co-founder, the most important question is always: what fundamental changes to iOS are going to create ripples throughout the software industry?

This year, the answer is simple—widgets.

Sure, they’ve been tried before on Android (and Mac OS X, and so on…), and have rarely taken off. To be honest with you I have no idea why.

But I do know that if you offer the Instagrams, Spotifys, and Snaps of the world this kind of opportunity, they will take it.

What do I mean by opportunity? Well, widgets have a few, tiny, little-bitty advantages over normal app icons:

• they can change content throughout the day, including color-swapping and displaying photos
• they can display multiple buttons that can launch different screens or modes inside an app
• they are either 6.8x or 14.5x (!!!) the size of normal app icons

Widgets are basic giant interactive billboards for mobile applications. Some obvious ideas of what to do with them:

• Instagram will update with the latest photos from the algorithmic feed
• Snap will show images from your friend’s stories or display the Snap Map when your friends are (safely) clustering at one venue
• Spotify will display the album art of the last three albums you played so you can click in to resume
• Uber/Lyft will put a “call an car to my current location” button on their widget
• Netflix will show screencaps from whichever episode you’re halfway-through so you can start it up again

Etc., Etc.

These are just the ideas I came up with in the first two minutes of thinking. I’m sure there are much better ones. And the people working at these companies are very smart, very capable, and very motivated.

The one potential stumbling block to widgets' global domination is if they are too difficult to discover and place on one’s homescreen. Widgets are indeed hard to find—when you upgrade to iOS 14, they start out buried in the “left of homescreen” area that I have yet to find a use for. They are also hard to put into place—Apple’s “jiggle mode” that allows users to re-arrange app icons continues to be one of the most fiddly, frustrating interfaces devised by humans. So it’s not impossible that typical users will find it hard to discover and arrange widgets.

But, on the other size of the ledger, we have the massive word of mouth that these widgets are going to generate. I don’t typically make overconfident predictions about the success of unreleased features, but widgets are perfectly engineered to go viral.

Again! They are gigantically-sized and extra-visually distracting! They can be easily shared via screenshot or simply showing your phone to friends and family! Apple will put hundreds of millions in marketing dollars behind them!

I expect that the average iPhone homescreen will be 25-50% widgets by December 31st. Assuming we are all still alive.