iOS 14 is Here. Where are the Microsoft Widgets? (Premium)

UPDATE: Microsoft just announced---via an impossible to find Tech Community post---that it will support widgets in OneDrive and Outlook Mobile (calendar only), though there’s no word on when that will happen. Nothing about Your Phone, of course. A pretty weak showing given the months of time they’ve had, but better than nothing.

--Paul

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Apple released iOS 14, but Microsoft---one of the few companies with experience with at-a-glance UIs---isn’t ready with its own widgets. Why?

It’s a reasonable question. One of the many innovations that debuted with Windows Phone 7 in 2010, Microsoft’s belated response to the iPhone, was its live tiles-based user interface through which apps and hubs could display “at-a-glance” information---the weather forecast, news headlines, your most recent unread emails and schedule events, and so on---without requiring the user to open and close apps. That this was superior to the mobile interface offered by Apple with the iPhone---and copied by Google with Android---was then and is now obvious: I refer to those interfaces as “whack a mole” because you had to---still have to---go in and out of apps to get at the information they contain.

Yes, both iOS and Android eventually adopted notifications, accessed via a pull-down shade, notification bubbles, lame app icon counters (for the number of unread emails in an email app, for example), and, in the case of Android, large home screen-based widgets that sort of but not really offered similar functionality to live tiles. And then Apple added widget support to iOS, but only in the silly and barely useful feed to the left of the home screens.

But live tiles, of course, were special, so special that Microsoft brought them to Windows, first in Windows 8 in 2012, and then again in Windows 10 in 2015. Live tiles make much less sense in desktop Windows because you don’t get that same “at-a-glance” functionality you do on mobile. Instead, you have to open the Start menu---or, in the early days of Windows 8, the Start screen---to see them. That extra step makes them less useful, and as a result, live tiles have failed on desktop Windows. We expect them to disappear starting in Windows 10X.

But live tiles on mobile? Wonderful. Useful. And if you ask any former Windows phone user what they miss most about Microsoft’s mobile platform, live tiles will be one of the top answers, if not the top answer.

And then Apple happened.

This past June, Apple announced that it was improving iOS’s support for widgets. As with live tiles in Windows/Windows phone, these widgets would now be available in four sizes---the exact same sizes we see in Windows 10, in fact. And more important, they would be added to the home screen. Just as with Windows phone. As I wrote in In Praise of iOS 14 (Premium), the support for these improved new widgets is my favorite new feature in the new system. No surprise there: I was the Windows phone’s first and big...