I love widgets but …

[H. Flower]

Why they don’t they update ? I’m a productivity junky and widgets have huge potential for me, but I don’t understand why they display old intimation.

For instance , I have a things widget showing me what my tasks are for the day, but on ios17 and Sonoma, it often shows me 2 day old data. Why don’t the widgets refresh every time a screen is reloaded ?

Or is this a problem with the things widget only ?

 

[matrix07]

My widgets are up to date.

 

[jedimasterkyle]

Do you have background refresh enabled? I've found that having that enabled, plus going into the respective app at least once a week refreshes the widget data. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing.

 

[pacorob]

I love my widgets as well for things like calendar (minical, DayHub), power usage (HomeWizard Energy), blank widget / background image (Clear Spaces), minute by minute (Buienalarm), upcoming hours/days (Carrot), PRs and progress for running (shoutout to Workout Sessions, Flink and HealthFit), countdown (Countdown Widget+) and mountain webcams and forecast (Bergfex Ski).

Keep in mind a few things:

- there are refresh rate limitation which Apple and the developer can set for widgets as far as automatic refreshing

On Reddit a few years ago a user wrote this: The update schedule is very robust as well as configurable by the developer and can be independent of its associated app. For any specific app / widget, the question is best asked of the developer. The weather app 'Carrot' for example has levels of updates for the app on iPhone and the watch (depending on the subscription).

- make sure you have the latest iOS version and latest version of the app (which is recently updated). If an app/widget hasn't been updated in ages that could also be the reason that it is no longer working correctly with the latest iOS/iPadOS versions.