I’ve always wanted Apple to bring these Live Tiles to the iPhone. Apple’s overhauled iOS 14 home screen finally does that, enabling lively widgets for apps that sit on the home screen. It’s the final addition to the iPhone that I’ve been missing from Windows Phone, 10 years after Microsoft first introduced Live Tiles to the world.
Live Tiles were one of Windows Phone’s most unique features. They enabled apps to show information on the home screen, similar to the widgets found on Android and iOS. You could pin almost anything useful to the home screen, and Live Tiles animated beautifully to flip over and provide tiny nuggets of information that made your phone feel far more personal and alive.
Apple has taken the best of both Android widgets and Windows Phone’s Live Tiles and combined them into iOS 14. It’s not the first time we’ve seen Windows Phone features appear in iOS or Android, and it underlines how important Microsoft’s mobile efforts were even if they were a glorious failure.
Tom Warren
Even though I love Live Tiles, I have never been a fan of widgets on Android. After switching from iOS two years ago I simply put my most used apps on my – single – home screen and relied on search for the rest. But these discussions about upcoming widgets in iOS sparked my interest, so I started experimenting with widgets a bit. I currently own a Samsung Galaxy S8 with Android 9 and Samsung’s One UI, version 1.0.
The results have been… underwhelming. There are a lot of variations depending on the app, and unfortunately this leads to inconsistency in design, in sizes and shapes. Samsung app widgets offer extra settings for background (white or black) and transparency – too bad I replaced these with Google apps since the beginning. None of the third party apps have this setup, making me suspect it is an element of One UI that no other developer bothered to support – which is a shame, because the end result is quite nice looking. Some apps have extensive widget configurations available, but you have to make decisions as you create the widget with no way to preview the result; if you don’t like it, you have to restart from scratch – I do not want to waste my time with this game of trial and error. Some widgets simply do not load properly, for example Microsoft News; Flipboard loaded content initially, but then later failed to show anything or to refresh – maybe this is tied into the battery optimization settings, but it would be nice to have some warning or guidance in this case.
In the end I managed to find only a few widgets that work reliably and look well enough to be pinned on my home screen. Funny enough, two are from Samsung, showing weather and upcoming events. The second one happens to solve a long-standing issue with missing birthday notifications from Google Calendar: if I cannot receive notifications, at least my agenda is now one swipe away.
I must admit that the iOS 14 preview has tempted me into considering an iPhone for my next smartphone. But then I started thinking about the many ways Apple is forcing people into their platform for their own gains, how they restrict developers and hamper competition, about the lack of support because I happen to live in a country without Apple Stores, and most of all about their inflated hardware prices and stinginess around including accesories for new iPhones. And so, I decided I can happily stay on Android for the future.
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