WidgetPod 4+

Not sure

When I click the widget to open what I’ve selected which is the Apple Music app it first opens the widgetpod app?
Also when I click the controls on the widget such as next song, it does work however the widget has a glitch like episode where it increases in size slightly and goes black before doing what I’ve selected? Is this normal or could this be because I am using ios15 public beta 2?

Developer Response ,

Hello Jarad,

Both things you mentioned are completely normal and are due to limitations by iOS. iOS doesn’t allow Widgets to directly open any other app and by default opens the parent app, so it’s the parent app that needs to redirect to the app you need, i.e. Apple Music in your case. Sadly, an iOS limitation and that’s why we named it ‘Redirect to Player App’ and not ‘Open Player App’.

About the glitchy animation when using controls, that again is an iOS limitation, in iOS, widgets aren’t allowed to perform tasks themselves, they must assign the task to its parent app and open it, what WidgetPod does is quickly kick you out of the app when it’s done with the task. Without the kicking out, the app would simply stay open until it’s manually closed. Unfortunately, since this is an iOS limitation on how Widgets work, we couldn’t bypass that and this is the best that’s possible. Hope you understand.

I have a tip if it helps:
If you enable Reduce Motion in Settings.app > Accessibility > Motion, the flickering becomes less obtrusive, but that does disable some more animations iOS wide. If that’s something you don’t mind, you can enable it.

Thanks for reviewing.

Tons of customisation

I don’t know why this app has lower ratings than other widget apps. Even though you need to pay to use it, this offers much more customisation. With the limitation of iOS 17 widgets, it’s understandable why live updating does not work but I anticipate when such limitation is lifted that it be implemented immediately.

For improvements, I’d like to see if the built in player were able to have much more control like as if it were a mp3 player app at least for songs downloaded on a device.

Great; just 1 bug needs a fix.

I love this app; it provides the essential customisations to the music widget for use. Definitely worth purchasing! The only thing holding it back is a bug (or design issue) that means it doesn’t sync very often, meaning that the currently playing song isn’t always visible (it could be the song played 20mins ago).