WidgetPod 4+

I love this app, and it is very customizable and gives you the option to make your widget blend perfectly with your home screen no matter what layout you’re aiming for. However, there is a huge feature that’s missing that’s very important to me, and that is automatically refreshing the “now playing” song. I know that it works fine when you have the WidgetPod app running in the background, but I so badly wish that the widget would update without needing to run the WidgetPod app. I gave the app 3 stars because that’s a huge deal for me, and is kinda the whole point of the app. I know this feature isn’t implemented due to Apple’s limitations, but if there is ever a way to work around it, that would be awesome. It’s still a great app either way, and I will continue to be using it! The automatic refresh would bring the app to 5 stars though.

Glad to see you’re enjoying WidgetPod.

It’s good to know you understand the limitations and it is indeed due to the limitations that the widget cannot update live by itself in the background. If in future iOS adds such a capability, we’ll make sure to add support for it.

Thanks for reviewing.

Loving the app, super clean looking and the level of customization in the pro version is great. Two main things I would like to point to for fixing.

1. When tapping the widget or selecting one of the functions of the player(back,pause,next) the widget gives a small visual pop as if it was attempting to open the WidgetPod app that kind of can takes you aback. If this could be fixed that it does not happen that would be great.
2. When the option of open music application for tap feature is set the app has to open first and then redirects to iTunes. If this could also be bypassed then this would be 5 stars for me no problem.

Glad you’re enjoying WidgetPod.

The issues you mentioned are perfectly reasonable, unfortunately they’re both due to iOS limitations.

1. 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.

2. In Widgets, tap action is just like tapping on an app icon, it takes you to the app and there’s no way to prevent the widget from opening the host app or ask it to open any other app, this is coded in the iOS itself and we don’t get any control to change this behaviour. Hope you understand.

Thanks for reviewing.

On the small widget, if you have playback controls on and you have the general tap action set as “toggle playback”, it does exactly that but if you want to go to the previous or next song, you have to press on said icons very precisely otherwise it will pause/unpause; same for whatever action you have configured for tapping on the text.

Also, there’s a delay of a few seconds between when you press the playback buttons and the the music application responds.
Those are my only complaints.

Hey, if you find the small buttons harder to press, you can increase their size from your Widget Setup → Playback Controls → Size inside the app. Hope it helps.

Thanks for reviewing.