Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone—iOS 14, brings many new features to your iPhone and iPad. One of the tentpole features is the ability to add widgets to the home screen and they’re surprisingly wonderful.
Widgets, by their very nature, are quite useful. They offer a quick glance into apps without having to fire them up.
With widgets, you can view part of your Twitter feed right on your home screen, view your workout metrics, upcoming schedules, grocery lists, news, and much more. The possibilities are endless and are to the credit of the creativity of developers.
Android has been offering widgets since its advent. While they’re almost similar to iOS 14 widgets, there is one major difference. Unlike Android, you cannot directly interact with widgets on iOS 14. In other words, widgets on iOS 14 are informative as opposed to interactive.
While apps can show you essential data like workout metrics, currently playing music, and email feeds, you cannot control that data right from the widget. Tapping on any aspect of a widget takes you to the corresponding action in the app instead.
When iOS 14 was still in the beta phase of its development, the only widgets that were available were Apple’s own. However, with the official release, a lot of developers are now updating their apps by adding widget support. Over time, we also expect many other apps to come up with their own widgets.
That said, here are the best iOS 14 widgets you can get. These apps have only made the list because they offer some value, look good, and stand out from the rest.
Furthermore, they are categorized for your convenience. You’re gonna love them!
Social
Apollo for Reddit
Apollo has always been at the forefront of new iOS releases. It’s a splendid alternative for the official Reddit app in that it adds additional, useful elements atop the regular crop of features that the official app offers.
It’s also one of the first apps that support widgets on iOS 14. And they’re magnificent, both by design and purpose.
The Apollo Reddit app offers a total of 16 widgets that show information in a slew of different ways. There’s a widget for simply displaying images, showing posts from a subreddit in different formats, and separate widgets for the r/showerthoughts and r/jokes subreddits.
However, the one widget that stands out, at least to me, is the 4×2 posts widget.
It has the ability to display posts from your home feed, the popular feed, your favorite subreddit, and more in a stylistic format with the image on the right and the post title on the left just above the upvotes and comment statistics.
Aviary
Twitter junkies, now’s your time to shine! Aviary is a new third-party Twitter alternative that offers a host of convenient features that let you navigate through your Twitter feed with ease without ads.
You can also customize what goes on your feed and what doesn’t. But the best part about Aviary is that it also offers three third-party widgets.
The sole purpose of those widgets is to display tweets that appear in your Twitter timeline.
If you’re someone who has a habit of constantly checking their Twitter feed, this widget is a must-have. The widgets also have a simple design with a blue background, so make sure you place them among apps that have a blue icon to achieve a sense of continuity on your home screen.
Productivity
Todoist
One widget that I’ve always wished for is a to-do list widget. It’s a widget that makes the most sense. It’s made to-do list apps great for me again.
Look, I loved to-do lists apps even before Apple announced iOS 14. But I’d always use a new to-do list app for a few days and then forget to check it daily just because I couldn’t form a habit of opening that app regularly.
Well, widgets on the home screen on iOS 14 solve that problem entirely. I can see my tasks right on the home screen, which makes it harder to avoid and more likely to get done. That said, Todoist is my favorite to-do list app for a bevy of reasons.
Its design is pragmatic and consistent. However, the feature that stands out the most is support for natural language.
What I mean by that is that while setting a task, all you need to do is type as you normally would and the app will automatically pull all the necessary information including the time and date from the text, and set the task for you.
Then there are the five widgets that Todoist offers. They are designed in alignment with the app’s design with its red headers and white pages.
The widgets offer data ranging from your tasks to your daily streak. Todoist also has a feature where it tracks your karma based on the number of tasks you complete; one widget shows that too. Plus, Todoist has also slipped in a button masquerading as a widget that lets you quickly add a task, which I’ve found myself using a lot. All-in-all, if you love to-do list apps and heavily rely on them, you’ll adore these widgets.
Documents by Readdle
Documents by Readdle is a powerhouse of a files app. It lets you store any kind of file and preview it seamlessly. What’s great about this app is that it doesn’t make you feel like you’re using a cheap, terribly designed, flaky file manager. Readdle has done a really great job designing the app and its widgets are no less amusing.
In all, Documents offers 12 widgets spanning four categories namely Music, Recents, Favorites, and Actions. The Music category features widgets that let you track what’s being played and also what’s next in line in three different sizes. The Recents widgets let you glance through the files you recently browsed within the app.
The Favorites widgets, well, show you a glimpse of your favorite files and allow you to access them in a tap right from the home screen. Finally, the Actions category features widgets that let you perform certain in-app actions by tapping on quick shortcuts.
However, the most striking feature about Document’s widgets is their design. It’s colorful, consistent, and unlike any other. I think you’d like to have them on your home screen.
Spark Mail
Spark Mail is a prolific email app known for its simplicity, design, and the host of smart features that help you manage and view your email better. The app features useful features such as email collaboration, scheduling, natural language search, cloud support, built-in calendar, and sleek design.
It’s because of the unconventional nature of these features—and the fact that they’re packed in a single email app—that Spark is popular. And now, it’s added a slew of new widgets too.
The new widgets are also just as simple as the app. They display emails and calendars in different widget sizes. For instance, you can set a 2×2 widget that simply shows the number of emails you’ve received. Larger widgets display more information including a peek at the content of the email, a calendar, and several quick actions.
Couple that with the app’s amazing ability to sift through a crop of incoming emails and separate the important emails from the inessential ones and you’ve got yourself a perfect email widget that is accessible right on the home screen. This means you’ll never miss your important emails again.
Spark’s calendar widget is something to look out for. It’s unlike other calendar widgets on iOS 14 and displays your events in a unique and colorful timeline. Spark also supports iOS 14’s default apps feature, which allows you to set it as a default email client on your iPhone.
Habitminder
If you are looking for motivation to get into shape, drink more water, and stick to your new year resolutions (meh!), Habitminder is the app you should download. The app has more than 50 pre-defined habits for you to track so that you can get started right away. You can also create your own habits. Habitminder will then notify you to complete your habits from time to time.
One limitation that the app imposes upon users is the number of habits you can track at a time, which maxes out at three. If you want to track more habits, you’ll need to pay for a subscription or a one-time purchase fee.
What’s great, however, is that Habitminder has added support for iOS 14 widgets and they are quite helpful. The process of tracking habits is much more like tracking your to-dos—you increasingly lose motivation to make the effort of opening the app and ticking checking your tasks.
Having your habits being tracked right on the home screen where they are directly visible makes them all the more worthwhile and profitable.
Since it’s a simple habit tracker, Habitminder offers simple widgets whose purpose is to display your progress. Two widgets among the seven widgets that Habitminder offers, provide buttons to quickly log a habit completion.
Dark Noise
Dark Noise is an app that I’ve wanted for so long, but for some reason, couldn’t find it. Call it destiny or sheer luck, I can now listen to ambient noise while working right from my home screen.
Moreover, developer Charlie Chapman has created a cool video with smooth renders to show off the app and its new home screen widgets. Check it out:
With Dark Noise, you can listen to ambient sounds which is useful in helping you focus, relax, or sleep. The app not only lets you listen to sounds like white noise, birds chirping, raindrops chattering; but also offers a feature using which you can mix your own sounds to create a customized track.
And with iOS 14, you can get access to those sounds right on your home screen using widgets. Sure, you can always hop over to the app and play a soundtrack, but using widgets is way faster. However, despite the benefits they offer, I see a niche user base for Dark Noise’s widgets. This is because as much as ambient sounds are effective, a lot of people haven’t incorporated them into their respective schedules; and hence, they likely wouldn’t want to give up essential home screen real estate for a widget that only lets them play the sounds.
Similarly, it’s just as useful a widget for users who incorporate listening to ambient sounds in their daily schedule since it gives them easy access.
The Dark Noise widgets have come in different themes, but do a little more than just letting you tap to play a sound. You can configure a widget to play your favorite sound at a sound level defined by you.
You can also pre-set the timer for different sounds. The app offers tons of widgets in many different configurations. There’s a widget that puts multiple sounds into one widget, while individual sounds with custom volume and timer settings have their own 2×2 widgets.
Hour Blocks
Hour Blocks is a revolutionary time planner that allows you to dedicate every hour in a day to a task. This is an advanced, yet simpler way to schedule your day, as opposed to the tedious process that you have to go through to set an event in most calendar apps.
Instead of displaying the calendar itself, the app is task-focused and shows what tasks you have lined up for the day. You can add what the app calls hour blocks to your timeline (which is chronologically arranged), which are tasks that you plan to do in a particular hour of the day.
This ultimately helps you make sense of your schedule without being overwhelmed with the difficulty of viewing it in the first place. Hour Blocks also has a simple design that, in itself, implicitly highlights the tasks.
The app offers widgets that follow a similar design language. They’re simple, and show a glimpse of your tasks for the hour, thereby holding you accountable for the task by constantly reminding you about it whenever you log into your phone.
Drafts
Drafts is a popular note-taking app that lets you quickly jot down notes and ideas without having to worry about organizing it. The app opens up to a new note each time so that you can start typing right away. Think of it like an empty scrap of paper that you found lying around that would be perfect to just pen down what’s on your mind.
Now, with iOS 14, Drafts also offers a ton of widgets which are basically divided into two categories—grid widgets and list widgets. The grid widgets are mainly dedicated to actionable buttons that let you quickly access commands, workspaces, and actions within the app. The list widgets, on the other hand, are simple widgets that display a list of notes from a workplace that you specify.
The widgets are not as aesthetically pleasing as other widgets in this list, but it gets the job done. Plus, it’s the perfect use of a widget. Impromptu notes are often left somewhere in the dust as we forget to get back to them later on. However, losing them is a lot less difficult when you have them right in front of your eyes each time you unlock your iPhone.
Cheatsheet Notes
Do you ever forget your hotel room or the registration number of your new car? Well, Cheatsheet is here to help with its home screen widgets. Cheatsheet lets you jot down random things that hold temporary value like a quote you heard someone speak that you may forget later.
The app offers widgets in different sizes and for different purposes, but mainly of three types—lists, actionable lists, and quotes. The list widgets show all your Cheatsheet items in a list on your home screen alongside a button to add new items quickly, which is extremely useful.
But what’s more useful are the actionable widgets that allow you to quickly copy the list elements and offer smart actions, for example, the app will automatically detect if the list item is a phone number and place a call button right next to it; both in-app and on the widget.
That said, the quotes widget is nothing short of beautiful. It features the quotes that you jotted down into the app in a beautiful dark background with white text atop. It looks quite mesmerizing on the home screen.
Motivation
Everyone requires a push at some point in their life to move forward when things seem a bit gloomy. Motivational quotes prove to be a great tool to cheer yourself in times like these. Motivation is a great app that offers motivational quotes right within.
What’s great is that now you can get motivation delivered right to your home screen, thanks to iOS 14. Motivation offers a slew of widgets of three different sizes that feature motivational quotes. I cannot stress how calming it is to have a motivational quote right on my home screen; I surely cannot put it in words.
Nevertheless, you get the ability to change the background of the quotes widget from within the app’s theme settings. There is a multitude of themes available that you can choose from, however, you’ll need to unlock them which requires either purchasing it or watching a 30-second ad.
There are no buttons and no options to configure. It’s as simple as it gets. What’s interesting, furthermore, is that you can set how often you want the widget to update. I’ve set it to update after 30 minutes because I don’t think I’ll be picking up my phone often.
If you are someone who constantly checks their phone, you should probably set it to update every 10 minutes.
PDF Expert by Readdle
If what you do involves a lot of dealing with PDFs, this app is for you. PDF Expert is a full-fledged PDF powerhouse that offers no less than a desktop-class experience. You can easily do the regular tasks that you’d expect a PDF app to do—annotate, sign, redact sensitive data, add links and images, create notes, and upload documents to various cloud services.
What makes it even more special is the widget support it brings along with its latest update for iOS 14. A bevy of widgets offers several useful options from allowing you to get right into one of your documents right on your home screen to quickly establishing a connection with your computer. It’s a really good use case for a widget, and I think you’re going to love it.
Lazy Bones - Routine Planner
Lazy Bones, as the name playfully suggests, is for those among us who strive for a change from their monotonous and lethargic lifestyle (you know who you are!). It is yet another habit planner, albeit, with a pinch of fun.
It features a playful design replete with emojis and colorful graphs that lets you visualize your progress easily and further motivates you to stay true to your promise of sticking to a habit. There are over 200 preset habits you can choose from enabling you to quickly start tracking one. The last thing you’d want in a habit planner is complexity. Lazy Bones, thankfully, is as simple a habit planner can get.
It now also features widgets that display the list of habits you’re currently tracking alongside a streak counter. The app offers three widgets that are also capable of switching the theme from white to black when system-wide dark mode is enabled.
Finance
Copilot
Copilot is a finance app that lets you easily track finances and subscriptions. The app automatically logs in data from your bank account once you connect it to the app. Then, it displays a host of information including your spending history, your monthly budget, and more.
One of the main features that this app touts is subscription tracking. Instead of scrambling around for your active subscriptions at different places, the app offers them at one place so you can stay informed of any upcoming renewals. You can also connect your investment accounts to the app and it will track your holdings and balances.
What’s interesting here is that the app has also recently begun offering home screen widgets on iPhones as part of iOS 14. The widgets display your account statistics right on the home screen on your iPhone. Obviously, seeing their anxiety-inducing bank balance on the home screen might not be what people want ultimately, but the app also offers quick actions in the form of home screen widgets that let you quickly log your expenses.
It’s worth noting that Copilot is a subscription-based app, though.
MoneyCoach Budget and Spendings
MoneyCoach is a simple finance planner app that keeps track of your budgets and offers you insights on how you can save some money by the end of every month. Unlike a full-fledged financial tracker that lets you add bank accounts, MoneyCoach is rather basic.
With the app installed, you can specify how much you earn each month and your fixed expenses. The app will then automatically segregate your budget across different categories. You can also set a goal. For example, if you are saving up to buy a new car, you can specify that to the app and it will work towards helping you manage your budget in a way that you achieve your goal faster.
MoneyCoach also comes with a slew of widgets including ones that let you display how far along you’ve arrived in terms of your goal. You can also set a widget that shows you a glimpse of your monthly budget. Being able to look at your monthly budget right on your home screen is the best use case for a widget and you should totally check it out.
VectorVest Stock Advisory
If you are into stocks, this app is the one you should download. It offers instant stock analysis, exclusive stock pick ideas, and coaching to help you track, understand, and manage your stocks better.
The app tells you the right time to buy a stock and claims to be the “only service that combines the power of fundamental valuation with the insight of technical analysis.”
What’s even better is that the app supports iOS 14’s home screen widgets, meaning you can view stock data right on your home screen. Particularly, the VectorVest features widgets that either show market timing or a watchlist of stocks that you are currently tracking within the app.
These are really useful widgets for people who regularly indulge in trading stocks as it helps to get to the useful data faster upon which you need to base your decisions.
Stocks
Apple’s own Stocks app is great for getting a stock watchlist and market news. But, since it’s developed by Apple, it’s also one of the first apps to support home screen widgets.
Stocks, unlike VectorVest, only offers watchlist widgets that display a list of stocks that you’ve added to your collection within the app. There are four sizes in all, ranging from a smaller, 2×2 watchlist to a 4×4 watchlist. There’s also a 2×2 symbol widget that shows data for a single stock.
Stocks comes preinstalled on iPhones. However, if, for some reason, you don’t have it, you can head over to the App Store and download it or tap on the button below.
Utilities
Parcel
Parcel is a delivery tracking app that allows you to track incoming parcels. It’s a useful app that lets you view a bevy of data including the estimated arrival time and the current status of your parcel.
The app offers maps to help you visually determine where your parcel has reached. It also allows you to scan a barcode to add a delivery to track within the app.
Parcel also supports home screen widgets on iOS 14. The widgets are simple as well, featuring only the status of your deliveries in three different widget sizes. It’s a must-have if you need to track your deliveries every now and then. You’d have to be tracking a lot to warrant a widget on your home screen.
Eventime
Eventime is is an event countdown app that focuses on the fundamentals. There is no clutter and the app is divided into two sections—Events and Explore. The Events tab shows countdowns of your current events while the Explore tab helps you discover upcoming events.
Eventime also features home screen widgets that, well, you’ve guessed it; show a countdown to your events right on the home screen. There are in all three widgets, two of which display a single event in separate styles and the other widget displays a list of countdowns to your upcoming events.
Weather Line
Weather Line is a beautiful and accurate weather app. It pulls rain data from Dark Sky, forecasting from Accuweather, and radar data from WDT, which are all industry leaders in providing weather data.
The app was one of the first apps to offer iOS 14’s home screen widgets and became popular since. It’s widgets are splendid in appearance and present weather data in a unique way. What’s particularly interesting about Weather Line’s widgets is that you can choose from among 20 different themes and five styles.
Combine that with the fact that a weather widget makes the most sense as a widget out of all and you’ve got yourself something that’ll live alongside your apps on your home screen for eternity.
Solar Watch
Solar Watch is yet another utility that shows you the Sun’s position throughout the day. It’s a useful app for people who time their actions based on sunlight, for example, photographers.
The app is quite simple and there is nothing substantial to configure apart from allowing location access. Solar Watch also brings along widgets that you can add to the home screen on your iPhone. The widgets are nothing short of gorgeous and are offered in various sizes and designs.
There are three categories of widgets that Solar Watch offers. The first category simply displays a list of cities that you are tracking sunrise and sunset timings for. The second category displays the app’s own Solar wheel that illustrates the position of the sun relative to your location. The third, and the final category, displays both the solar wheel and additional information like sunrise and sunset timings.
Bring! Shopping List & Recipes
Bring is the ultimate shopping list app for your iPhone. It offers a bevy of features like shared lists, individual shopping suggestions, and loyalty cards. The app’s design itself is unobtrusive letting you focus on your shopping list and stick to it. The app even offers recipes to try out.
What’s interesting is that it offers widgets that you can add to the home screen. However, the number of widgets Bring! offers is quite limited—only three. The first two widgets serve you a shopping list right on your home screen while the last one is a recipe widget that shows you different recipe ideas.
It’s a highly useful widget while shopping in a store as you can view list contents directly on your home screen, speeding things up a little.
Usage
Usage is an app created for the specific purpose of offering home screen widgets. It’s relatively new as compared to most apps on this list. Usage offers widgets that display your iPhone’s usage statistics such as how much storage is left and how much memory is in use. You can also view your network connectivity stats like WiFi and Cellular usage, etc.
Usage is for tech-savvy iPhone users who need to monitor their iPhone’s usage. It’s especially useful for developers as the app helps them actively note the resources their app is hogging.
Glimpse 2
Glimpse 2 does something unique. It captures a snapshot of a user-defined area of any website and displays it as a widget, which can be set to update at different time intervals.
This can be useful when you want to track news on a news website, or maybe a deal on Amazon. Personally, I use it to track price drops on the AirPods Pro on Amazon. The widget automatically updates whenever it detects a change in the frame it’s covering.
Despite its usefulness, I wouldn’t recommend it for longer use as it doesn’t fit well with the home screen design. This is mainly because the widget’s design is dependent on the website it’s tracking. That said, unless a website’s design language matches with iOS 14’s home screen design language, you’ll have a hard time keeping this widget on your home screen.
Home Screen Customization
iOS 14 has introduced a slew of new features that let users customize their iPhones to unprecedented levels. Users can now set custom home screen icons, add widgets right to the home screen, change the charging sound of an iPhone, and more.
Developers saw this opportunity and took the leap developing apps that let users customize their iPhones even further. These apps rose to popularity as soon as they were published after iOS 14 was officially launched. So much so that the top 20 home screen customization apps on the App Store took home a collective of $400,000 in just four days.
Widgetsmith
Widgetsmith is a relatively new app that lets you create customizable widgets containing all sorts of stuff from weather to a calendar to simply random strings of text. Out of the 20 apps that bagged in $400,000 in revenue, around $370,000 was earned by Widgetsmith alone.
With Widgetsmith, you can add a multitude of widgets spanning across different data types and grid sizes. For example, you can set a battery widget on the home screen. But it’s not limited to that. You can also customize the look and feel of the battery widget. You can also select other items to display such as time, date, or a calendar and also customize it to death.
This level of customization is unique as no other app offers it to the level Widgetsmith does, which is why it has gained a top spot in the App Store Top Charts. The app is free to download, but you’ll have to pay a fee to perform certain customizations.
Color Widgets
Color widgets is yet another widget-making app that allows you to create beautiful and informative widgets. The widgets mostly contain a mix of items like the calendar, the time, the battery status, and more. There are hundreds of pre-made, colorful widgets that you can choose from. A lot of them are impressive.
What’s even more appealing about Color Widgets is that it lets you totally customize a particular widget. You can change the look and feel of it by tweaking the elements and changing the background color.
Photo Widget: Simple
Photo widget is a simple widget app that displays the photos you select in different widget sizes. Apple also has its own photos widget, but it doesn’t allow users to control which photos appear there and instead, selects a featured image of its own choice.
You can also set multiple photos into an album to display a dynamic photo widget.
Just like Photo Widget: Simple, tons of other similar photo widget apps have popped up on the App Store, most of them having little distinction in their title, making it difficult to discern the original app. Nevertheless, all the other apps function just fine. But, if you want to use the original photo widget app, we’ve linked on the button down below.
Many have taken to Twitter to boast their home screen setups with custom app icons and widgets. Photo Widget: Simple is one of the most ubiquitous widgets featured in those setups.
We’ll continue to add new apps to this list. We suggest you bookmark this page and keep coming back.
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