Concept shows how cool iPhone widgets would look on iPad

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iPad widgets deserve the freedom to move.
iPadOS limits Home screen widget placement. A concept artist shows there’s no reason for this limitation.
Photo: A Better Computer Trailer

While Home screen widgets came to iPad first, the release of iOS 14 offered iPhone users much more flexibility in widget placement. A concept designer showed what iPadOS 15 could look like with the same flexibility.

Widgets can show the weather forecast, upcoming events, stocks, etc. They can be of various sizes, and, on iPhone, placed anywhere on the screen. That flexibility has allowed some creative people to completely remake their handset’s Home screen.

Free the iPad widgets

On iPad, widgets can only be along the left edge of the display. A concept artist from A Better Computer Trailer shows why there’s no reason for this limitation.

The challenge is that the spaces between the icons for applications and folders on the iPadOS home screen vary considerably between different models. And the distances between icons even change when the tablet is rotated between landscape and portrait mode. (iPhones don‘t have to deal with that latter difficulty because the iOS Home screen doesn’t have a landscape mode.)

The concept by A Better Computer Trailer shows that this problem isn’t insurmountable. Widgets would need to be able to resize themselves, though. The change would only be about 15%.

Watch the video from A Better Computer Trailer to see the concept in full.

It’s not clear if Apple has plans to remove the limitation on widget placement in a future version of iPadOS. When asked about this back in June, Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, said “Whether over time we want to let you push that further, letting you move widgets out of their designated spot beside the app icons or not, we’ll see. But we felt like we had a great balanced solution for this already.”

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