Adding widgets to your iPhone’s home screen is about more than just aesthetics. Many Apple and third-party apps offer stunning and functional widgets that can make your life easier and save time without requiring you to open the respective apps.
Interactive widgets were introduced with iOS 17, allowing you to interact with app features rather than just viewing stats or progress. Here are ten interactive widgets that live on my iPhone home screen, and what they do.
1
WaterMinder for Health
Apple Health has a built-in water tracker, but there are no widget options that let you log your water intake from the home screen (yet). There’s a water logging shortcut that you can set up, but if you’re looking for interactive water widgets, try WaterMinder. This is a clean app that can help you track your daily water intake through a hydration avatar of yourself. The app updates your progress throughout the day and syncs with Health for seamless sync.
WaterMinder offers 16 widget options, including a hydration progress tracker (interactive), a current hydration viewer, a hydration status (progress and warning) bar, a streak counter, and a cup logger (interactive), with different graph and tracking options for each. Widgets need a premium subscription ($14.99/year) to be used.
2
TickTick for Task Management
TickTick is a to-do and schedule management app that helps you record personal and work tasks in a neat, color-coded calendar.
You can also set countdowns for important dates, create checklists, use a focus timer, and classify tasks with tags. The app offers a range of widgets to help you manage your schedule and focus on work effectively, including interactive ones to help you add tasks easily.
The app’s interactive widget options include an “Add Task” inbox, a “Calendar + Task” view where you can tap a date to see your schedule, and a Focus widget where you can quickly start a Pomodoro timer. Other widgets help you view your daily and weekly habits, task completions, focus distribution, habit heat map, countdowns to specific dates, priority matrix of your tasks, and calendars.
TickTick syncs with Apple Calendar and can also be used on iPad and Apple Watch.
3
Fantastical for Productivity
Fantastical is an award-winning, free calendar app that offers everything you need to manage your schedule, including task lists, reminders, event templates, time zones, weather forecasts, and sync with conference calling apps (Google Meet, Zoom, Teams). The sleek interface and calendar view options make this a good alternative to your iPhone’s Calendar app.
Fantastical is known for its custom icons and widget options. Interactive widgets include various customizable event lists where you can add events and a quick action widget that lets you add events or tasks. The app also has calendar view widgets in different sizes for an easy view of your week or month.
4
Zenitizer for Self-Care
Zenitizer is a meditation app that helps you time your sessions and provides relaxation with meditation sounds. The app helps you steadily build a meditation routine through streaks, mindful minutes counting, and meditation history tracking. It is compatible with Siri and Apple Watch.
Zenitizer’s three “Meditation Routines” widgets let you start a preset, personal meditation routine with a tap. There’s also a goal and routine widget that combines this quick action with a goal progress circle that shows your meditation time and streak. Display widgets include a simple daily goal circle and a statistics widget. I love using Zenitizer’s interactive widgets since they strip the procrastination out of my daily meditation routines and remind me to take a break during a busy day by just glancing at my home screen.
5
Liftin’ for Tracking Workouts
Liftin’ is a workout tracking app for strength training and weightlifting, which lets you create custom workouts and programs. The app offers progress tracking, stats, trends, and insights into your workouts, as well as a plate calculator to determine how much weight you’re pulling or pushing. Liftin’ is compatible with your Apple Watch for quick tracking.
Liftin’ offers a simple yet essential interactive widget that lets you track and time your entire workout routine from your home screen. By adding this widget, you can instantly start a timer for one of your scheduled workouts, see which exercise you’re on, how many reps and sets you have, and what weight you need to do. Since workouts can be customized on Liftin’, you can easily adjust this widget to take progressive overload and rest time into account. The widget’s timer can be paused, resumed, and ended from the home screen as well.
6
MoneyCoach for Budget Tracking
For a comprehensive budget tracker that you can quickly access through widgets, try MoneyCoach. This personal finance app offers features like a budget planner, financial planner, credit card manager, accounts and expense trackers, and a bill organizer to manage all your transactions and spending in one place.
MoneyCoach’s best interactive widgets include a transaction tracker that lets you quickly add a transaction amount and categorize it, a net worth quick action to track your daily spend limit and calculate your net worth, and a budget tracker. Display widgets include goals, favorite budget (for a specific savings goal), and upcoming bills.
7
Lookup for Vocabulary
Lookup is a learning app that can help improve your English vocabulary through Word of the Day cards, learning collections, and premium lessons. The app has a notable lookup feature that lets you scan, capture, voice, or search words and find their origin, synonyms, antonyms, and more.
Lookup’s widget delivers a Word of the Day to your home screen, with widget options that let you like, shuffle, and refresh the word. There’s also a search widget which lets you look up, paste, or scan words and find meanings. The “Learn” widget lets you start a learning session based on your word collections, and a flashcard widget helps you learn words quickly.
8
Chronicling for Tracking Everything
Chronicling is a unique logging app that lets you track everything from work and study to fitness and health metrics. The app lets you plot events in custom categories and track your progress across the board as you log events (like reading a book, going for a run, or finishing a work task).
Chronicling’s interactive widgets include a grid heat map that you can swipe, event widgets to update the time of an event, and event logs for single or multiple categories. While some widgets require a premium subscription, the free interactive widgets are still functional and useful for logging your events.
9
Dark Noise for Ambient Sounds
Dark Noise is an ambient noise app with over 50 sound options that help you relax or sleep better. The app offers custom mix options, a Sleep Timer, themes, and Shortcuts integration.
All widgets offered by this app are interactive and help you quickly play your favorite ambient sounds. Dark Noise’s quick play and “Now Playing” widgets let you access playback controls from your home screen. The “Multi Noise” widgets show your favorite sounds as icons for instant play, and the “Big Noise” buttons play a configured ambient sound. You can also add quick play widgets to your iPhone’s lock screen.
10
Overcast for Radio and Podcasts
If you’re looking for a podcast app with a fun interface, offline listening, high-quality audio, and interactive widgets, Overcast can be a good option. This award-winning podcast app lets you create custom playlists with smart filters and offers CarPlay and Apple Watch support.
Overcast’s interactive widgets, like Spotify’s and Apple Music’s, let you adjust playback controls from your home screen. Apple Podcasts also offers interactive widgets that can be used to access playback controls.
The best part about third-party apps that support widgets, interactive or not, is that many of them also offer support for your iPhone’s Control Center, making it possible to add icons for quick access. You may also find that interactive widgets can be used on your Apple Watch if the apps are available for the device.
