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Widgets have instantly proven to be the most popular feature in iOS 14, allowing users to give their home screens an additional layer of customization. iOS 14 includes two built-in widget options that aim to use Siri’s intelligence to help further customize your iPhone’s home screen widgets. Is that how it works.
Siri Suggestion Widgets
If you’re the type of person who relies heavily on swiping down to access Siri app suggestions in Spotlight search, the Siri Suggestions widget is an excellent consideration for your home screen widget. The Siri Suggestions widget will display relevant actions “based on your usage patterns.”
There are two different Siri Suggestions widgets:
- App Suggestions: Get app startup suggestions based on your usage patterns (available in medium size)
- Shortcut Tips – View relevant shortcut actions based on your usage patterns (available in small, medium, and large sizes)
My personal favorite here is the app suggestion widget, which will present a rotating selection of app icons based on what Siri intelligence thinks you might be looking for. For example, if you normally post your lunch to MyFitnessPal at around the same time every day, the app suggestions widget will present the MyFitnessPal icon at that time of day.
In fact, once you add the app suggestions widget to your home screen, the app icons will look just like any other app icon. It’s a pretty nifty use of Siri’s intelligence and one of Apple’s coolest widget implementations.
To find these widgets, long press the iOS 14 home screen to enter jiggle mode, look for the “+” in the upper left corner, then look for “Siri Suggestions” in the widget list.
Smart batteries
One of Apple’s widget types in iOS 14 is Smart Stack, which intelligently stacks multiple widgets based on factors like time of day and Siri intelligence. By default, you can choose a pre-built smart stack from the widget picker, but you can also create custom widget stacks.
This means that you can choose different widgets and stack them on top of each other, then swipe between them. To do this, simply add a widget to your home screen, then go back to the Widget Gallery and choose another one and drag it over the first widget. You can stack many different widgets together and then swipe them right from the home screen.
Once you add a Smart Stack widget to your iOS 14 home screen, you can long press on it, choose “Edit widget”, and enable or disable the “Smart Rotate” feature. This feature will automatically rotate through the widgets in the stack based on the time of day and Siri intelligence.
Find more third-party apps with iOS 14 features like home screen widgets, app clips, and more in our full roundup.
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