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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I always thought widgets were a huge deal and then I realized... and I played with them all the time but inevitably ... I used them less and less and less.

My phone as a sort of dashboard just doesn't work, I suspect it would require too much customization to really create to work for me and probably anyone else. Usually I want to just open a specific app anyway.

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Widgets are the only way I can stand having smart home things. Whenever I want to control a light it's always right now and widgets give me that.

The ideal way for most "control something" widgets to work is the way the iOS "Apple TV Remote" app already works, when added as a Mission Control button.

It's 1. a regular app; plus 2. a shortcut to get into that app that can be accessed with one swipe from the lock screen; plus 3. a lock-screen widget that displays if the phone fell asleep while the app was in the foreground; and finally, 4. a separate "lock-screen embedded pseudo-app" (sort of like the Camera one you get to by swiping left on the lock screen), which you get to if you tap the "Remote" Mission Control button without first unlocking the phone. This last view allows people to still use your locked phone to pause the Apple TV it's controlling, if you're not there to unlock it for them.

It's too bad that no third-party app on iOS can achieve this same level of integration.

I wouldn't see much point in your 3 and 4 for home automation stuff. Homekit does 1 and 2, and for the bulbs I use it with, that's plenty.

I wouldn't say that's ideal because it's predicated on seeing & using the lockscreen, which is itself not ideal.

Ideal is the device is instantly unlocked when I pick it up - which is also the reality I have as an Android user, but you can experience this on iOS as well with jailbreak mods. And with widgets it's then zero swipes to get to my lightbulb controls, which is just sweet.

Ideally there would just be a button that could turn on the lights in the room (to the level I want). In olden times this button was mounted to the walls of said room, but in these modern times, it would be awesome if that button was a real button, on my phone, like the volume up/down buttons, and would just turn the lights on/off in the room the phone is in. That Apple's got this hacky solution thats suffciently functional shouldn't be taken as the end-state on what an ideal solution is.

Widgets can be very useful if you set them up correctly. For example I am checking our KPIs daily with a single swipe.

Shameless plug, I've recently made an app for this, to create custom widgets: https://www.wowidget.com/

I find it really helpful having the calendar widget on my first homescreen

I need a calendar and todo list in my face. Notifications were okay but there's so many of them now it's mostly noise.

The only "widgets" I use are on my lock screen: time, weather, meetings. Everything else is just a distraction.

My android phone home screen has contained a weather widget and a music player widget for the past 7 years. I love having both of those things instantly viewable and interactive.

Widgets can definitely be overused. But I like having a calendar, a data usage meter, music player controls, and quick access to my top couple of contacts.

I enjoyed widgets when I used Android. Being able to keep a few key contacts 1 tap away, the weather and calendar always visible, and being able to single tap to create a new todo, another single tap to open my groceries note, etc. was pretty cool.

With the latest iphones being as fast as they are it's not a game changer to not have widgets, but I definitely found them extremely convenient.

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