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Despite what the FaceBook posters claim, no widget in iOS 14 secretly captures keystrokes, because it is impossible for them to do so.
If you blinked in confusion that widgets were a huge security risk, we are with you. If you looked at your iPhone and wondered what a calendar widget could do with the information you pressed once, we are still there with you.
The idea, however, is that having installed a malicious widget, it doesn’t just notice it when you touch it. Instead, and trust us, we can’t stress enough that this is nonsense that we want to use a stronger word, enable a keylogger.
That is, after you have installed this, everything you write is recorded and sent to an infamous developer. All your passwords, all your account details, each one of those Messages, who knows, maybe even with emojis, now in the hands of a bad actor.
If there’s a department at Apple that collects reactions to all the new features in iOS 14, they just opened a document they called “Give us strength.” They may also be writing that you just can’t please some people.
Apple was doomed for not having Android-style widgets, now it’s destroying our lives and ruining our children’s futures. Or something.
Why this can’t happen
We didn’t come to call widgets, they are a great and useful addition to iOS that we are all having a great time playing with. But really the only thing different between a widget and app icons that we’ve had since 2007 is the size and what they use that size for.
Aside from Apple’s own Clock app, which has always shown the current time, apps display an icon that you tap to open the app. Widgets display very large icons that you tap to open the app.
No widget does anything other than show large icons and open an app when you tap them. And that’s because no widget can do anything else.
Big icons are great because instead of being just an app developer’s logo, they can be really useful. The widget icons can display text, images, news headlines, anything.
It is precisely this that makes them useful, and it is precisely what makes them actually a little less useful than you might expect. It would be great to be able to tap on, say, a Notes or Drafts 5 widget and start writing something right away.
A widget can display a lot of different information, but it just shows it, and it’s just waiting for you to tap to open your app. Each widget could be an app icon, because there is nothing else to do here.
Apple logo for WidgetKit, the development resource for creating widgets.
Why do people think this is true
We are tempted to say “find us”, but there are reasons why some people have thought widgets are doing this and others have agreed that they should. The first is that when updating to iOS 14, some users receive notifications that their passwords have been compromised.
This isn’t iOS 14 yelling your passwords at everyone, it’s iOS 14 doing a good job of notifying you of a problem. If you are very lucky, it is a recent problem. Chances are, you’ve been using passwords on sites that have been compromised for a long time.
So most of the people who categorically say online that widgets are evil say so because their phone got suspiciously slow when they installed the widget.
They did not install the widget. They installed iOS 14 and then installed a third-party widget, or added one of Apple’s built-ins.
The key is iOS 14. Any OS update makes a big difference and will regularly slow down your device at first while rebuilding the indexes that make search work. Indexes that mean that when you want to start an app, iOS knows where it is and opens it right away.
People who think it is more than this are convinced that anyone who captures your keystrokes must have done so badly that it visibly slows down your phone. People who are sure this is what happened have been known to even completely erase all data on their iPhones and start over from scratch.
Yes. Your iPhone will be faster. Anyway, it would be faster if you had just waited a bit, but a completely erased iPhone with nothing on it will feel faster because there is no search index rebuild in progress. Because there is nothing to look for.
We’d love for widgets to be more interactive, rather than billboards for your core apps, but they’re not. Right now, they can’t be.
