Here Are All the New IPhone Widgets That Ship With IOS 15
In iOS 14, Apple finally introduced home screen widgets to the iPhone . While third-party developers can create widgets for their apps, some of the more useful widgets are for native iOS apps that support features that you are most likely to use every day. And when you upgrade to iOS 15, you’ll find six new Apple widgets, as well as two new updates for Smart Stacks. Let’s check them out.
New Apple Widgets in iOS 15
Let’s take a look at six of Apple’s new widgets in iOS 15, starting with:
Find my
The new Find Me widget offers two modes: People , which gives you an idea of the location of the people you track in Find Me (Apple warns that not all devices and configurations are supported here); and Items , which allows you to keep track of the items you track with Find My, such as AirTags and AirPods Pro. Both people and objects are presented as small to medium sized widgets.
Contacts
The new Contacts widget displays a list of your main contacts. If you follow the location of any of these contacts, you will see that they also appear under their name. Using the “Change Widget” option, you can change the order of the list or replace a contact by long pressing on the name.
Game Center
The Game Center widget is available in two different versions; Continue Game, which allows you to quickly access recently played games, and Friends are Playing, which allows you to check the games your friends have recently played. Both options are available in small, medium or large widgets.
App Store
Apple calls the App Store widget today; Named after the Today feature in the App Store, it will show you daily updates on what’s new in iOS apps and games. It comes in small, medium and large sizes.
Sleep
The Sleep widget is called Data & Schedule; it shows you how well you slept the night before and analyzes your sleep schedule. It is only available as a small widget.
Mail has a new Mailbox widget that gives you quick access to one of your mailboxes (of your choice). This is a medium to large widget.
New changes to smart stacks
In addition to these new Apple-created widgets, iOS 15 brings some new tweaks to smart stacks that group together various useful widgets for you, altering them based on factors such as the time of day.
Smart widget suggestions
If you are using smart stacks, you may notice that iOS offers widgets to add to this stack depending on your application usage. This feature can be enabled or disabled when editing Smart Stacks.
Reorder Smart Stacks
You can now reorder your smart stacks much easier than in iOS 14, thanks to the improved controls of the updated iOS.