iOS 14 lets you stack multiple widgets to keep your Home screen clean

Apple is finally giving us the ability to add widgets to iPhone’s Home screen with iOS 14 this fall. In the interests of cleanliness, it is even allowing those widgets to be stacked so that they don’t cause too much clutter.

Here’s how it works.

Android-owning friends will be quick to tell you that Google’s operating system has supported Home screen widgets since the very first Android device, and that’s true. But iOS already offers some big advantages.

Not only do widgets look and fit a lot nicer on iPhone, but they’re also stackable. So, if you want five different widgets to be easily accessible at all times, you don’t have to fill your whole Home screen with them.

How widgets stack in iOS 14

You can stack widgets by simply placing one on top of another. A row of dots will appear alongside them — like the page indicator at the bottom of your Home screen — to highlight there’s more than just one there.

You can then scroll through those stacked widgets by swiping up or down on them. So, you could have four or five that take up just four squares on your Home screen and are always easy to reach.

It seems those widgets must be the same size to begin with, so a 2×2 widget can only stack with other 2×2 widgets. As far as I can tell there is no limit to how many widgets can be stacked. I got to up to seven.

Smart rotation and editing

By default, these stacks will “smart rotate.” That means your iPhone will learn how you use them, then sort them automatically. If you use Weather first thing in the morning, that’s what you’ll see. If you check your Activity when you get home from work, that should be displayed instead.

You can tap and hold the stack to access some settings, like a toggle to disable smart rotate, and the ability to manually sort your stack and remove widgets you no longer wish to see in it.