WidgetAIBest iPhone Home Screen widgets in 2026, by category
· Updated · Antoni, builder of WidgetAI
A good Home Screen widget earns its place. It shows you something you'd otherwise unlock your phone and open an app to check, and it does it at a glance. The trouble is that most widgets are fixed: you get what the developer decided to make, in the size they decided to make it. So the real question isn't "what's the best widget app" — it's "what's the best widget for the thing you actually want to see."
Below are our picks, grouped by what you're trying to put on your screen. We've tried to be honest: where a dedicated app is genuinely the best pick, we say so and link to it. And where nothing off the shelf fits, we mention building your own, which is what our app is for.
Updated September 2026 with clocks, reminders, music and quotes, plus a note on how widgets look under iOS 26's Liquid Glass.
A note on iOS 26 and Liquid Glass
iOS 26 brought the Liquid Glass design to the Home Screen, and it changes what "looks good" for a widget. With the clear or tinted icon appearance, a widget with a heavy, opaque, off-palette background now stands out more than it used to, while widgets with translucent or wallpaper-tinted backgrounds sit naturally next to your icons. Practically: if a widget you like suddenly looks out of place after updating, try a version with a clear, tinted or gradient background before replacing it. Most of the apps below offer some control over this; in WidgetAI you can just ask for "a translucent background that picks up the wallpaper".
Weather
For most people the built-in Apple Weather widget is fine, and it's free. The reason to reach past it is personality and precision. CARROT Weather is the standout here: accurate forecasts wrapped in a genuinely funny voice, with a wide range of Home and Lock Screen widget layouts you can tune. If you want a widget that shows exactly the fields you care about — say, today's high and low, chance of rain, and sunset — a dedicated weather app gets you most of the way.
Where it falls short is combining weather with something personal. If you want the forecast next to your commute time or your next meeting, no weather app will do that, because it only knows about weather. Our custom weather widget guide covers what a describe-it-yourself version can show, hourly forecast and sun times included.
Clocks and time zones
Apple's Clock widget shows up to four cities in the medium size and it's perfectly good for that. The gaps appear when you want a clock that's also something else: time plus battery, time over a photo, a flip-clock look, or the current time in two offices next to today's date. Widgetsmith's clock presets cover the styling side well. For anything that mixes a clock with other data, or needs a specific city label, see our world clock widget guide.
Calendar and agenda
Apple's Calendar widget is solid and shows your next few events. The thing worth knowing is that a great agenda widget is less about features and more about density: how many events fit, how readable the time is, whether all-day items show. Fantastical and Structured are both well regarded for turning your day into a clean, scannable list, and both offer widgets that are more legible than the stock one.
A tip that applies to every calendar widget: they read from the same system calendars, so the difference is purely presentation. Pick the one whose layout you can read fastest from arm's length. If you want the agenda combined with the weather or your reminders, that's a custom calendar widget job.
Reminders and to-dos
Apple's Reminders widget shows a list, and Things and Todoist both ship excellent widgets if you live in those apps. What none of them do is put your next reminder beside your next meeting on one tile, which is the single most common agenda request we hear. The reminders widget guide covers that, along with the honest limit that no widget lets you tick an item off without opening the app.
Health and fitness
Apple's Fitness widget shows your Activity rings, and Health can surface steps and other metrics. For a friendlier take on progress, Pretty Progress is built specifically for showing goals and streaks as clean progress bars and rings, which reads well at widget size.
The catch with health data is privacy and combination. Most people want one tile with steps, sleep, and rings together — not three separate widgets — and they want that data to stay on their phone. If that's you, it's worth reading our guide to iPhone health widgets, which covers what's possible with HealthKit and how a custom widget can pull steps, sleep, and activity rings locally, with your permission, into a single layout.
Battery
The stock Batteries widget shows your iPhone and connected accessories, and it's the simplest option. For something more visual, apps like Pixel Pals and various battery-focused widget packs turn charge level into a character or a bold graphic.
Battery is one of the categories where a custom widget shines, because the interesting versions — a big color-coded percentage, a ring that fills, a grid that empties as you drain — are all just one number rendered differently. We wrote a whole walkthrough on building an iPhone battery widget exactly the way you want it. One honest caveat that applies to every battery widget on iOS: the system only reports battery in 5% steps, so no widget can show a true 1% reading.
Photos
If you just want faces you love on your Home Screen, a focused app is the right call. Photo Widget: Simple does one thing well — rotating through a set of photos you choose — without the clutter of a bigger customization suite. Widgetsmith also does photo widgets and layers them with clocks and dates if you want more going on.
Photos are the one category where a plain, single-purpose app usually beats anything more complicated. Pick your pictures, set the rotation, done. If the rotation itself is what bugs you, our photo widget guide explains how often photo widgets change and how to pick the exact photos instead.
Music
Apple Music's own widget shows recently played albums, which is handy for tapping into something, but it isn't a now-playing display. A true now-playing tile with the current track, artist and artwork is possible on iPhone, with the caveat that widgets can't control playback and update on a schedule rather than the instant a song changes. Our Apple Music now-playing widget guide has the details, including why this works with Apple Music and not Spotify.
News
For headlines, Apple News and most major outlets ship their own widgets. The more flexible route is a widget that reads any RSS feed, so you're not limited to one publisher — you can pull a favorite blog, a subreddit, or a niche source that never made an app. Widgets built around RSS are the way to get a genuinely personal news tile rather than whatever a single app decides to show you; the RSS news widget guide walks through it.
Quotes and affirmations
There's a crowd of quote-of-the-day apps, and most of their widgets look the same: a serif quote on a pastel background. They're fine. The reason to build your own is control over the words (your own list rather than a random feed) and pairing the quote with the date, the weather or a photo. See the quote widget guide.
Finance and crypto
Stocks has a built-in widget, and for crypto there's a crowd of apps that show prices. The thing to check is refresh behavior and which coins or tickers a given widget actually supports, because the free tiers are often narrow. If you follow a specific basket of coins or stocks, a widget you can point at exactly those symbols beats a curated list you can't change. Our guides to a crypto price widget for iPhone and a stock widget with a chart cover building one that tracks exactly what you hold, with a small price chart, rather than the default top ten.
Developer
This is the underserved corner. If you want your GitHub contribution graph, open pull request count, or CI status on your Home Screen, almost nothing ships that out of the box. A green contribution heatmap on your phone is a surprisingly good nudge to keep a streak going, and it's the kind of thing you basically have to build. We put together a guide for a GitHub contributions widget for iPhone if that's your thing.
When no preset fits, describe it instead
You'll notice a pattern above: the dedicated apps are great when your need matches what they built, and frustrating the moment you want something slightly different — steps next to a stock price, the forecast beside your next meeting, a battery ring in your own colors.
That gap is why we built WidgetAI. Instead of picking a preset and hoping it fits, you describe the widget you want in a chat and the AI builds it, then you refine it by talking. It has templates for weather, clocks, calendar, reminders, health, GitHub, crypto, stocks, news, photos, quotes, and battery to start from. Under the hood it has built-in live-data connectors — weather, air quality, crypto, stocks, world clocks, GitHub, RSS, quotes, and service status — plus on-device signals like battery, location, calendar, reminders, photos, and HealthKit, all read locally on your phone with your permission. You can lay out text, icons, charts, gauges, heatmaps, and gradients.
Two honest limits: WidgetAI does small and medium sizes today, not large yet. And the free plan covers 1 widget and 10 AI edits a month, with Pro (an in-app purchase) lifting those limits and adding custom HTTP API connectors. If you're coming from something more manual, our comparison of Widgetsmith alternatives lays out where a describe-it approach helps, and how the chat AI builds your widget explains what's happening behind the scenes.
FAQ
What's the best free iPhone widget app? For pure aesthetics, Widgetsmith and Color Widgets both have generous free tiers. For weather, Apple's own widget is free and good. WidgetAI's free plan covers 2 custom widgets. The best free option really depends on what you want to show.
What are the best iPhone widgets in 2026? Category by category: Apple Weather or CARROT for weather, Fantastical or Structured for agendas, Pretty Progress for goals, the stock Batteries widget or a custom battery ring, a single-purpose photo app for photos, and an RSS-based widget for news. For anything that combines sources, build your own.
Can one widget show data from two apps? Not with most single-purpose widgets — each only knows about its own data. To combine, say, your steps and a stock price on one tile, you need a widget you build yourself.
Are custom widgets safe with my health and location data? They can be. In WidgetAI, on-device signals like HealthKit and location are read locally on your phone, with your permission, and aren't uploaded to be displayed.
Do these support large widgets? Most third-party apps do. WidgetAI supports small and medium today; large is on our list but not shipped yet.
WidgetAI is made for iPhone and Mac, and it's available on the App Store now.