Widgets

A widget elevates a small amount of timely, personally relevant information from your app or game, displaying it where people can see it at a glance.

Even though interacting with a widget lets people see or do more in your app, a widget’s main purpose is to provide useful content people can get without opening your app. Useful and delightful, widgets can also help people make their devices more personal. For developer guidance, see Creating a widget extension.

Widgets can be small, medium, large, and — in iPadOS only — extra large. In iOS and iPadOS, widgets appear on the Home Screen or in Today View; in macOS, Notification Center displays widgets.

The widget gallery — available in Today View and Home Screen editing mode in iOS and iPadOS, and Notification Center editing mode in macOS — helps people find the widgets they want in the sizes that work for them. The gallery’s editing mode lets people make changes to editable widgets, such as changing the location in a Weather widget or selecting a topic in a News widget.

In iOS and iPadOS, the widget gallery also supports widget stacks, including a Smart Stack. A stack contains up to 10 same-size widgets; people view one widget at a time by scrolling through the stack. A Smart Stack automatically rotates through the stack of widgets, displaying the widget most likely to be relevant in the current context.

Siri can add a suggested widget to the Smart Stack when it’s likely that people are interested in it. A suggested widget doesn’t stay in the Smart Stack unless people choose to keep it. For developer guidance, see Increasing the visibility of widgets in Smart Stacks.

Best practices

The first step in the design process is to choose a single idea for your widget. Throughout the process, use that idea to keep the widget’s content focused and relevant.

Look for a simple idea that’s clearly related to your app’s main purpose. In some cases, this idea might mean choosing an idea that resembles your app’s overall purpose. For example, a weather app’s widget could show the weather for a single location, or the widget for a calorie-tracking app might show calories burned for the day. In other cases, a widget’s idea can reflect an aspect of the app’s main purpose. For example, a game’s widget could show a character’s status, or the widget from a drawing app might display favorite sketches.

In each size, display only the information that’s directly related to the widget’s idea. In larger widgets, you can display more data — or more detailed visualizations of the data — but it’s crucial to stay focused on the widget’s idea. For example, all Calendar widgets display the user’s upcoming events. In each size from small to extra large, the widget maintains its focus on events while expanding the range of information as the size increases.

Avoid creating a widget that only launches your app. People appreciate widgets because they provide instant access to meaningful content. A widget that behaves like an app icon offers no additional value and isn’t likely to remain on the screen.

Offer your widget in multiple sizes when doing so adds value. In general, avoid simply expanding a smaller widget’s content to fill a larger area. It’s more important to create one widget in the size that works best for the content you want to display than it is to provide the widget in all sizes.

Prefer dynamic information that changes throughout the day. If a widget’s content never appears to change, people may not keep it in a prominent position. Although widgets don’t update from minute to minute, it’s important to find ways to keep their content fresh to invite frequent viewing.

Look for opportunities to surprise and delight. For example, you might design a unique visual treatment for your calendar widget to display on meaningful occasions, like birthdays or holidays.

Updating widget content

To remain relevant and useful, widgets periodically refresh their information. Widgets don’t support continuous, real-time updates, and the system may adjust the limits for updates depending on various factors.

Keep your widget up to date. Finding the appropriate update frequency for your widget depends on knowing how often the data changes and estimating how often people need to see new data. For example, a widget that helps people track tides at a beach could provide useful information on an hourly basis, even though tide conditions change constantly. If people are likely to check your widget more frequently than you can update it, consider displaying text that describes when the data was last updated. For developer guidance, see Keeping a widget up to date.

Let the system update dates and times in your widget. Widget update frequency is limited, and you can preserve some of your update opportunities by letting the system refresh date and time information.

Show content quickly. When you determine the update frequency that fits with the data you display, you don’t need to hide stale data behind placeholder content.

Interactivity

In some cases, people need to edit a widget to ensure it displays the information that’s most useful for them. For example, people choose a stock symbol for a Stocks symbol widget. In contrast, some widgets — like the Podcasts widget — automatically display recent content, so people don’t need to customize them.

Make editable widgets easy for people to customize. If your widget is editable, avoid requiring too many settings or asking for information that might be hard for people to find. You don’t have to design an editing-mode user interface for your widget because the system automatically generates it for you. For developer guidance, see Making a configurable widget.

Ensure that a widget interaction opens your app at the right location. When people interact with your widget, it deep links into your app, where you can offer details and actions that directly relate to the widget’s content. Avoid making people navigate to the relevant area. For example, when people click or tap a Stocks Symbol widget, the Stocks app opens to a page that displays information about that symbol. Similarly, when people click or tap a small Stocks Watchlist widget, the app opens to show the complete watchlist. When people click or tap one symbol in a larger version of the Watchlist widget, Stocks open to show that symbol.

Avoid defining too many interaction targets. A small widget supports a single target, but larger widgets can offer multiple targets. For example, the medium Notes widget can display several notes. When people click or tap one of them, the app opens to display that note. Although multiple interaction targets might make sense for your content, avoid offering so many that people have to spend time choosing the one they want.

Let people know when authentication adds value. If your widget provides additional functionality when someone is signed in to your app, make sure people know that. For example, an app that shows upcoming reservations might include a message like “Sign in to view reservations” when people are signed out.

Interface design

Widgets use vivid colors, rich images, and clear, crisp text that’s easy to read at a glance. A unique, beautiful widget not only provides useful information, it also can encourage people to feature it on their devices.

Help people recognize your widget by including design elements linked to your brand’s identity. Design elements like brand colors, typeface, and stylized glyphs can make a widget instantly recognizable. Take care to keep brand-related design elements from crowding out useful information or making your widget look out of place on the Home Screen.

Consider carefully before displaying a logo, wordmark, or app icon in your widget. When you include brand-related design elements like colors and fonts, people seldom need your logo or app icon to help them recognize your widget. Also, the widget gallery displays your app name and icon when it lists the various types and sizes of widgets you offer. In some widgets — for example, those that display content from multiple sources — it may make sense to include a small logo in the top-right corner to subtly identify the app that provides the widget.

Aim for a comfortable density of information. When content appears sparse, the widget can seem unnecessary; when content is too dense, the widget isn’t glanceable. If you have lots of information to include, avoid letting your widget become a collage of items that are difficult to parse. Seek ways to curate the content so that people can grasp the essential parts instantly and view relevant details at a longer look. You might also consider creating a larger widget and looking for places where you can replace text with graphics without losing clarity.

Use color judiciously. Beautiful colors draw the eye, but they’re best when they don’t prevent people from absorbing a widget’s information at a glance. Use color to enhance a widget’s appearance without competing with its content. In your asset catalog, you can also specify the colors you want the system to use as it generates your widget’s editing-mode user interface.

Support Dark Mode. Ideally, a widget looks great in both the light and dark appearances. In general, avoid displaying dark text on a light background for the dark appearance, or light text on a dark background for the light appearance. When you use the semantic system colors for text and backgrounds, the colors dynamically adapt to the current appearance. You can also support different appearances by putting color variants in your asset catalog. For guidance, see Dark Mode; for developer guidance, see About asset catalogs.

Consider using SF Pro. Using the system font helps your widget look at home on any platform, while making it easier for you to display great-looking text in a variety of weights, styles, and sizes. If you need to use a custom font, consider using it sparingly, and be sure it’s easy for people to read at a glance. It often works well to use a custom font for the large text in a widget and SF Pro for the smaller text. For guidance, see Typography.

Avoid using very small font sizes. In general, display text using fonts at 11 points or larger. Text in a font that’s smaller than 11 points can be too small for most people to read at a glance.

Always use text elements in a widget to ensure that your text scales well. In particular, don’t rasterize text — doing so prevents VoiceOver from speaking your content.

Consider using SF Symbols. SF Symbols helps you align and scale symbols with text that uses SF Pro. For guidance, see SF Symbols.

Design a realistic preview to display in the widget gallery. Highlighting your widget’s capabilities — and clearly representing the experiences each widget type or size can provide — helps people make an informed decision. You can display real data in your widget preview, but if the data takes too long to generate or load, display realistic simulated data instead.

Design placeholder content that helps people recognize your widget. An installed widget displays placeholder content while its data loads. You can create an effective placeholder appearance by combining static parts of the user interface with semi-opaque shapes that stand in for actual content. For example, you can use rectangles of different widths to suggest lines of text, and circles or squares in place of glyphs and images.

Avoid mirroring your widget’s appearance within your app. If your app displays an element that looks like your widget but doesn’t behave like it, people can be confused when the element responds differently when they interact with it. Also, people may be less likely to try other ways to interact with such an element in your app because they expect it to behave like a widget.

Write a succinct description of your widget. The widget gallery displays descriptions that help people understand what each widget does. It generally works well to begin a description with an action verb — for example, “See the current weather conditions and forecast for a location” or “Keep track of your upcoming events and meetings.” Avoid including unnecessary phrases that reference the widget itself, like “This widget shows...,” “Use this widget to...,” or “Add this widget.” Use approachable language and sentence-style capitalization.

Group your widget’s sizes together, and provide a single description. If your widget is available in multiple sizes, group the sizes together so people don’t think each size is a different widget. Provide a single description of your widget — regardless of how many sizes you offer — to avoid repetition and to help people understand how each size provides a slightly different perspective on the same content and functionality.

Consider coloring the Add button. After people choose your app in the widget gallery, an Add button appears below the group of widgets you offer. You can specify a color for this button to help remind people of your brand.

Adapting to different screen sizes

Widgets scale to adapt to the screen sizes of different devices and onscreen areas. Ensure that your widget looks great on every device by supplying content at appropriate sizes.

Design content to look great on all devices and scale factors, letting the system resize or scale as necessary. In iOS, the system ensures that your widget looks good on small devices by resizing the content you design for large devices. In iPadOS, the system renders your widget at a large size before scaling it down for display on the Home Screen. As you create design comprehensives for various devices and scale factors, use the values listed in Specifications for guidance; for your production widget, use SwiftUI to ensure flexibility.

Coordinate the corner radius of your content with the corner radius of the widget. To ensure that your content looks good within a widget’s rounded corners, use a SwiftUI container to apply the correct corner radius. For developer guidance, see ContainerRelativeShape.

In general, use standard margins to ensure your content is comfortably legible. The standard margin width is 16 points. If your widget displays content like text, glyphs, and graphs, use the standard margins to avoid crowding the edges and creating a cluttered appearance. For developer guidance, see padding(_:_:). If you use background shapes to create visual content groupings, or if you display button backgrounds, you might need to use tight margins. Tight margins — which measure 11 points in width — can also help make graphics that contain information easier for people to read.

Platform considerations

No additional considerations for iOS, iPadOS, or macOS. Not supported in tvOS or watchOS.

Specifications

iOS widget design comprehensives

Screen size (portrait)	Small widget	Medium widget	Large widget
428x926 pt	170x170 pt	364x170 pt	364x382 pt
414x896 pt	169x169 pt	360x169 pt	360x379 pt
414x736 pt	159x159 pt	348x157 pt	348x357 pt
390x844 pt	158x158 pt	338x158 pt	338x354 pt
375x812 pt	155x155 pt	329x155 pt	329x345 pt
375x667 pt	148x148 pt	321x148 pt	321x324 pt
360x780 pt	155x155 pt	329x155 pt	329x345 pt
320x568 pt	141x141 pt	292x141 pt	292x311 pt

iPadOS widget design comprehensives

Screen size (portrait)	Target	Small	Medium	Large	Extra large
768x1024 pt	Design canvas	141x141 pt	305.5x141 pt	305.5x305.5 pt	634.5x305.5 pt
Home Screen	120x120 pt	260x120 pt	260x260 pt	540x260 pt
768x1024 pt	Design canvas	141x141 pt	305.5x141 pt	305.5x305.5 pt	634.5x305.5 pt
Home Screen	120x120 pt	260x120 pt	260x260 pt	540x260 pt
810x1080 pt	Design canvas	146x146 pt	320.5x146 pt	320.5x320.5 pt	669x320.5 pt
Home Screen	124x124 pt	272x124 pt	272x272 pt	568x272 pt
834x1112 pt	Design canvas	150x150 pt	327.5x150 pt	327.5x327.5 pt	682x327.5 pt
Home Screen	132x132 pt	288x132 pt	288x28 pt	600x288 pt
820x1180 pt	Design canvas	155x155 pt	342x155 pt	342x342 pt	715.5x342 pt
Home screen	136x136 pt	300x136 pt	300x300 pt	628x300 pt
834x1194 pt	Design canvas	155x155 pt	342x155 pt	342x342 pt	715.5x342 pt
Home Screen	136x136 pt	300x136 pt	300x300 pt	628x300 pt
1024x1366 pt	Design canvas	170x170 pt	378.5x170 pt	378.5x378.5 pt	795x378.5 pt
Home Screen	160x160 pt	356x160 pt	356x356 pt	748x356 pt