Elon Musk’s X adds home and lock screen widgets for iOS, five years after teasing them

X for iOS

X, the social media platform, has finally introduced widgets for iOS, allowing users to pin live updates and shortcuts to their Home Screen and Lock Screen. This allows iPhone and iPad users to access top news, shortcuts, and notifications directly from their main screens, without opening the app. It marks a significant step in expanding X’s iOS experience, years after the feature was first teased in WWDC 2020.

The official X account shared a new announcement, which introduces the arrival of two types of widgets for the app, one for the Home Screen and another for the Lock Screen. It offers a more glanceable way to track activity on X across Apple devices. As 9to5Mac notes, these widgets come in three sizes: small, medium, and large, meaning they can adjust well on your screen, based on different users’ liking.

The Home Screen widget, dubbed ‘X News Highlights,’ provides users with a glimpse of trending headlines on the platform. Meanwhile, the Lock Screen widget for X offers more customisation options, showing your current notification count, and also displaying the number of unread messages in X Chat. There are also separate widgets for Grok AI, with one of them leading directly to a chat with the AI, while the other enables voice-based interaction.

As mentioned earlier, there are both large and small variants of these widgets, providing users a choice as to how they want them to fit on their screen. It is important to note that the Twitter for Android app had already added Widgets as early as 2010, the same time when the company introduced the smartphone app for Android OS.