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The best iPhone widget apps for making your home screen your own

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We can divide the concept of iPhone widgets (large icons that show auto-refreshed, real-time data from apps) into before iOS 14 and after iOS 14. That’s because, beginning with iOS 14, widgets were transformed in both form and function and added to the home screen. The newer genre of widgets provides information and direct access to popular iPhone functions — such as the weather and time — at a glance and can give you fast access to news, TV shows, picture albums, and more. Widgets can also use AI to show you items you’re most likely to seek at various times of the day.

Widgets can profoundly alter the way you use your iPhone by letting you dispense with meticulously constructed home screen folders, and changing their appearance presents expanded opportunities for functionality and organization. This has inspired some users to use widgets to customize and personalize the look of their home screen. Not surprisingly, there are numerous apps that help you accomplish this visual creativity. Here are some of the best iPhone apps for customizing widgets.

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iWidget Pro

iWidget Pro for iPhone screens.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

iWidget Pro customizes your home screen like a pro using various widget templates that let you make the most of your home screen. There are three widget sizes: small, medium, and large. Different layouts and designs are available for each to perfectly suit your background. The application includes detailed instructions on how to create and configure widgets.

Apple App Store

Widgetsmith (free)

Widgetsmith app for iOS.
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Widgetsmith offers a broad collection of customizable widgets covering date, weather, astronomy, and everything in between. Each adjusts to fit your taste and can be dynamically scheduled to appear on your home screen via rules you set. So, you can view the weather in the morning, your calendar during the day, and perhaps the Activity ring progress later in the evening. The app’s collection of tools includes a weather app, time zone converter, and calendar. Recent updates include seasonal collections with theme packs for a fresh look. The weather tool has been completely overhauled so that whenever you tap on a weather widget you’ll see a rich, graphical forecast of the location with hourly, daily, and radar weather data. A new set of fonts gives you a variety of new style options.

App Store

Widgeridoo (free)

Widgeridoo widget app for iOS.
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Widgeridoo lets you combine various blocks into widgets, such as calendar events, birthdays, text and images, date and countdown health data from your Health app, website data, battery percentage, and clocks. Use the app to combine blocks of information into a single widget in the size you prefer. An update offers a single widget on your home screen showing various widgets based on time and day.

App Store

My Widgets (free)

Pixel Widgets sample screens.
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My Widgets offers access to information and actions on your phone, allowing you to add widgets according to your preferences. You can add a calendar to display the current month plus your busy days, or you can add photos of family and friends, a horoscope, an online photo of the day, audio notes, or world clocks. You can view and edit text notes and reminders, while the Decision widget lets you randomly choose a single item from among choices. You can now open the URL of a widget in an app’s internal web browser rather than Safari. You can also display images in full screen and crop a photo during import.

App Store

Color Widgets (free)

Color Widgets for iOS.
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With Color Widgets, which lets you customize and style your home screen, you can start with a selection of pre-made designs, or you can make your own. There are hundreds of design options to create useful widgets, and you can even edit the widget’s font, theme color, or background color.

App Store

Widget Wizard ($2)

Widget Wizard for iPhone.
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Widget Wizard hooks into your Health app to track up to 35 health stats that you can combine with customized calendars and render in various color combinations, fonts, and backgrounds to create your own original theme. You can also use widgets to add data such as water intake or distance walked. The Agenda widget combines calendar events and reminders, letting you see countdowns to those items, as well as clock and battery percentage. Combo widgets let you choose the data you want to include in a single widget. Widget Wizard now displays weather alerts for the U.S., Canada, and the EU.

Apple App Store

Pixel Widgets ($1)

Pixel Widgets screen time.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Give your home screen a distinctive retro look with Pixel Widgets, either by using the app’s signature widget designs or by customizing your widget set with more than 150 color themes and fonts. You get hundreds of widget designs to choose from, including configurations of time and date or year in progress. Just choose a ready-made design or customize one, tap on your widget, select Set Widget, and you’re done.

App Store

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Jackie Dove
Jackie Dove
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Jackie is an obsessive, insomniac tech writer and editor in northern California. A wildlife advocate, cat fan, and photo app…
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