Yet they were still limited to built-in apps and services. IOS 7 split notifications and widgets apart, putting widgets in their own Today view, moving Weather to the Today Summary, and adding support for Calendar, Reminders, predictive location, and the Tomorrow Summary. Instead of having to leave what you were doing to go find information, you could pull that information to wherever you were, whenever you wanted, and then go right back to what you were doing with very little cognitive load. It could be pulled down from anywhere, including the home screen (and eventually the lock screen), and more importantly, from inside any app. When the App Store made apps more abundant, Apple added Spotlight as an ancillary way to help do just that. It was never meant for anyone to stop and stare at, but to quickly find and get into apps. Instead of putting them on the home screen, however, Apple put them in the then-brand new Notification Center.įor Apple, the iOS home screen was never meant to be a destination but rather a transport. With iOS 5, Apple brought limited widgets - our old friends Weather and Stocks - to the iPhone and iPad. In fact, after the first month of use, approximately 80% of you don't change your home screens any more.

Most of you don't modify your home screens much.

Widgets aren't widely used – weather, clock and music are the most used and after that, fewer than 10% of customers use any other widgets.

According to HTC, a prominent vendor of Android devices: Power users loved them, but few mainstream customers embrace them. What's more, they distinguished them from full-screen apps by making them smaller and letting them live on the home screen, amid the app icons.

Other platforms, including Nokia (pre-Windows Phone) and Android went ahead with widgets. Since the presentation was to be no different, and the limits of WebKit at the time meant performance wasn't as good as native apps, they were ultimately rewritten in Objective-C anyway. They wouldn't have looked or acted any differently than any other full-screen iPhone app, but they would have been built like Dashboard widgets, using Apple's web technologies instead of native Objective-C.

The original iPhone was supposed to include a version of OS X-style Dashboard widgets, namely Weather and Stocks. Apple introduced their vision of web-based widgets in OS X Tiger with Dashboard. With the rise of ubiquitous online connectivity, widgets took on a new roll: dedicated, glance-able information containers.

Lonely screen ios 10.1.1