Every iOS release moves the ground under a widget — new tint modes, new surfaces, new shapes. These faces are redrawn for each one rather than left to be squeezed by it.
iOS 26 pushed the system towards translucency, and a widget that leans on the same trick vanishes into the wallpaper behind it. The faces here keep a solid ground and use the glass language only where it adds depth — Glass, Aura and Bento most of all.
iOS 26 opened the dashboard to widgets in exactly one shape: the small square. Every square design in the collection works there, centred at its Home Screen proportions rather than stretched across a wider slot.
The app targets iOS 17 and up, so an older iPhone keeps every design it already had. New surfaces are additive: they appear if your system offers them and stay quietly absent if it does not.
Live previews
Live previews, running on your own clock.
Three things move, and only three. The tint modes — how iOS recolours a widget on the Lock Screen or a dimmed desktop. The surfaces — Home Screen, Lock Screen, StandBy, and since iOS 26 the CarPlay dashboard. And the shapes each surface offers, which is why the CarPlay square is a genuine design constraint rather than a setting.
Everything else is the same WidgetKit contract it has been since iOS 14: a timeline of pre-rendered entries, a refresh budget you do not control, and a per-second live view only where the system grants one.
That is why this site talks about surfaces rather than versions. When iOS 27 arrives, the designs that work today keep working; anything genuinely new gets its own layout, and this page will say what it is instead of promising it in advance.
Questions
Yes, including the surfaces iOS 26 added — the CarPlay dashboard among them. The app targets iOS 17 and later, so it runs well before that too.
The widgets themselves will: WidgetKit designs carry forward between releases, and nothing here depends on a private behaviour that a new version could remove. If iOS 27 introduces a new widget surface or shape, designs for it will follow — this page will describe them once they exist rather than before.
Anything that can install iOS 17 — iPhone XS and later. On those, Home Screen, Lock Screen and StandBy widgets all work; CarPlay widgets need iOS 26.
No. Every design available on your system stays available. Newer releases add surfaces rather than take faces away.
Free on the App Store. iOS 17+. No account, no ads, no tracking.