WidgetAIRSS news widget for iPhone: any feed on your Home Screen
Most news widgets on iPhone show you one publisher's idea of what matters. Apple News picks for you, and each newspaper app gives you its own headlines and nothing else. If the things you actually read live on a blog, a niche newsletter, a subreddit, or a developer forum, none of those widgets can show them. An RSS widget can, because RSS is the plumbing under nearly every publication on the web, and it doesn't care whether a site is big enough to have an app.
WidgetAI has a built-in RSS connector. You give it a feed, describe how you want the headlines laid out, and it builds the widget. This post covers what that looks like, what layouts work at widget size, and how fresh the headlines really are.
Why the stock news widgets fall short
The built-in News widget is fine if you like Apple News. The catch is that it's a curated stream, so you can't say "just this one site" or "only these three sources." Publisher apps solve half of that: the BBC widget shows BBC stories, and that's it. Neither lets you follow a source that never made an app, which is most of the internet.
RSS closes the gap. Almost every site with a blog publishes a feed, subreddits expose one, most newsletters have a web version with one, and aggregators like Hacker News do too. If you can find the feed URL, you can put it on your Home Screen. If you're weighing this against theming apps, our tour of Widgetsmith alternatives explains where a describe-it approach fits.
The fastest path
Install WidgetAI, open it, and pick one of the news templates: Front Page (a compact headline list), BBC News, or Hacker News. Or skip the template and type what you want:
"a medium widget showing the top three Hacker News headlines"
The AI wires the widget to the RSS connector, lays out the headlines, and shows you a preview. If you like it, add it to your Home Screen. If not, keep talking. We wrote about what happens between your message and the finished tile in how the AI builds your widget.
Pointing it at your own feed
The presets cover Hacker News and the BBC, but the connector takes any feed URL. Find the feed for the site you want (it's usually linked in the footer, or you can try adding /feed or /rss to the site's address), then ask:
"switch this widget to https://example.com/feed"
The AI swaps the source, and the headlines update to match. Feeds for a subreddit, a Substack, a podcast, or your own site all work the same way. You can also keep several feeds across several widgets: a tech feed on one tile, a local news feed on another.
One honest note: feeds vary in quality. Some publish only titles, some include a summary, some have odd formatting. The widget shows what the feed provides, so a sparse feed makes a sparse widget.
Layouts that work at widget size
A widget is small, and headlines are long, so layout matters more here than for a number-and-icon tile. Two patterns work well:
- A headline list. Three to five titles stacked on a medium widget, each on one or two lines. This is the Front Page template's default. "Show five headlines, single line each, with the source in a small label at the top."
- A single latest headline. One story, big, on a small widget. Good when you follow one feed closely, and it changes on its own as the feed does. "Just the newest headline from this feed, large text, dark background."
You can also ask for typography and colour: a serif for a newspaper feel, a monospace for a developer feed, a coloured accent bar per source. Because the AI is editing a real design, "make the first headline bold and the rest lighter" is a normal request. Charts and gauges are overkill here, but a small icon next to the source name is a nice touch.
Pairing headlines with something personal
Where this gets more useful than a publisher app is combining sources. A medium widget has room for three headlines and a second column, so you can ask for the weather beside your news, or a countdown, or your next calendar event. "Put today's weather on the left and the top three headlines from my feed on the right." Each half updates on its own. If you want to build the other half first, our guides to an iPhone weather widget and an iPhone calendar widget walk through those.
How fresh are the headlines?
Here's the honest part. A news widget feels live, but iOS widgets are snapshots that the system redraws on a budget it controls. WidgetAI lets you pick a refresh interval per widget, from every minute up to hourly, and our servers cache each feed with a freshness window that suits it, so a refresh spends its budget on showing you stories rather than waiting on a slow site. Even so, iOS decides when the widget actually updates, and it can be a few minutes to half an hour behind the feed.
For headlines that's fine: you're glancing, not trading. If a story matters enough to act on, tapping the widget opens the app, which reads the feed fresh. The full mechanics, and what you can do when a widget looks stale, are in how iOS widget refresh works.
Widgets also can't scroll or accept taps on individual items, so the widget shows headlines rather than letting you flick through them. That's an iOS rule for every app, covered in what iOS widgets can't do.
Beyond RSS: your own JSON
If the thing you want to see doesn't publish a feed at all, Pro users can point a widget at a custom HTTP API instead. Any endpoint that returns JSON works: a status page, your own scraper, a company dashboard. The walkthrough is in how to build a custom HTTP API widget. For most news, though, RSS is already there, and the built-in connector is included on the free plan.
FAQ
Can I make an iPhone widget from any RSS feed? Yes. The RSS connector accepts any feed URL, with Hacker News and BBC presets to start from. Describe the layout you want in chat and the app builds the widget.
How often does an RSS widget update on iPhone? You choose a target interval from every minute to hourly, but iOS decides when widgets actually refresh. Expect headlines to lag the feed by a few minutes to half an hour.
Can I show more than one feed on a single widget? Each widget reads one feed, but you can combine a feed with other data on the same medium tile, or build several small news widgets for different sources.
Is the RSS widget free? The RSS connector is included in the free plan, which gives you 1 widget and 10 AI edits a month. Custom HTTP API connectors for non-RSS sources are a Pro feature.
WidgetAI is made for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it's on the App Store. Start with "a medium widget showing the top three Hacker News headlines" and change the feed once you've seen it work.