Agreed. I think they’re going to be relatively useless until Apple open them up to third-party developers, as with Android!
(Haven’t seen anything about this but correct me if they announced this!)
Yep they’re very much open to developers – although they are fairly limited.
They’re not like the Today screen widgets of iOS 13 in that they don’t display “live” data. Put simply, an app has to sort of pre-compose what they display and declare “show this until further notice” or “show this until 10am, and then change to this”. Kind of like how Watch Complications work.
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I’m hoping that they are open to 3rd party devs already however the devs need to create them. I say this because if you go left on the home screen to the old widget screen, you can no longer edit or add widgets from iOS 13 they’re just stuck there but all the new ones are manageable above
There was a Nike one in the keynote, so they are definitely open to others.
One thing I love about them is something I didn’t realise until late last night. If you drag widgets on top of widgets you can create your own stacks like the smart stack. That way you can use quite a few that are interchangeable super easy without using too much of the screen
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The widgets are 100% open to 3rd party developers.
You can still edit them and change them around in “jiggle mode”
That’s actually really clever, I might go back and add a widget to my home screen. I assume these won’t be “smart”?
Nice. Thanks for the explanation! Will be interesting to see what we get.
You can toggle “Smart Rotate” on and off for custom stacks.
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What they said 
I am firmly in this camp too, I find them useless!
Does anybody else running the iOS beta keep having apps vanish of the home screen?
I have experienced that with iOS 13, but not with 14 (so far). I have two very strange bugs: YouTube refuses to play videos on mobile data and Google shows two search bars in Safari
Can confirm I dont get either of those bugs, just checked to see.
Has anybody worked out how to change default mail and browser apps yet? I’ve trawled through the settings time and time again, unless I’m blind then i can’t see it anywhere.
Also just want to say, my favourite feature is Double/Triple Tap back of the phone actions, they’re so simple yet so great! In my muscle memory already, plus if the action you want isn’t there you can create a shortcut for it, basically means you can trigger anything with those taps
I haven’t played with that yet - but now that you’ve said they can kick off Shortcuts my lunch break can’t come soon enough.
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I believe developers have to add support to their apps before they can be set as default. I can see Google adding pop-ups to beg you to do it once they enable the feature.
I like them too, but find them a little too sensitive. The actions get triggered every time I change hands or put the phone down with the screen on
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oh, i cant say i’ve triggered them accidentally yet, i’m sure i probably will though.
I was reading a tweet thread that said the new widgets are Read Only and can only link off to a specified url in the app and that you can’t have buttons etc like the old style widgets. If that’s true then that is really disappointing and a massive letdown for me personally
This is the problem for me, I’m trying to make my phone this way although I haven’t had the time to finish the organisation yet so currently my phone is a mess. I’ve used pretty much the same layout and organisation for my apps since pretty much forever so for me it’s a big change.
The only real complain I have is that i really really don’t like the grouping screen for app library, In fact I hate it. I’d rather lose that screen altogether and go straight to the list view. I would love them to give us the choice for that
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Does pull down still give you the search bar? I use that for anything beyond the first two pages.
Yeah have seen multiple devs say that so sounds correct. Agreed, huge backstep and can’t see why apple wouldn’t let them at least retain the level of interactivity they’ve had until now. Definitely not more useful.
They have also removed the ability to pop open a widget from the app icon, which again seems a step back, as now you either have to have a widget always there, or never, rather than being able to quickly interact when you needed to.
