On the To-Do app’s widget, for instance, you can tap the checkbox next to an item, and have it disappear from the list on your homescreen itself. It works as you’d expect: Though your iOS widgets look the same, a few of their elements are actionable. It had been especially frustrating for me as after years of living with Android, I had grown used to interactive widgets, and their absence on iOS had always seemed like a major, obvious miss. This was long overdue and I was surprised Apple didn’t include this when it debuted widgets. In addition, widgets are interactive on iOS 17, which means you can not only glance at an app’s latest information from your homescreen, but you can also execute some actions from it without ever launching the app. Around the time I go to bed, for example, my iPhone shows me a toggle for the next morning’s alarm as soon as I pull down on the homescreen for Spotlight search. Plus, Apple’s on-device intelligence is smarter at pre-fetching the shortcuts it thinks you’ll soon need. When I look up Clock, say, the “Top Hit” features shortcuts to start a new timer or alarm. Inside Spotlight search, your iPhone can now pull up shortcuts from third-party apps right to the top. IOS 17 also makes apps more modular and saves you the trouble of navigating through countless menus for one, little function. At the moment, it’s a tad buggy and often fails to load widgets for me altogether. There’s no space to scroll through all your unread alerts either, so I often have to reposition my iPhone back into Portrait mode to see them. On non-Pro iPhones specifically, the Standby Mode doesn’t offer always-on functionality and therefore, you’ll need to tap the screen or nudge the phone to wake it up, which defeats the purpose. If you’ve got MagSafe docks throughout your home, it can remember which widgets you access the most in each room like Reminders in your office space and Podcasts in your bedroom and sort them accordingly. What did work was the Standby Mode’s location awareness. But for me, it hasn’t been particularly accurate yet. It can, for example, bring up the Calendar in the morning if you regularly use it before work.

There’s also a setting that allows Standby Mode to automatically choose and rotate widgets based on your past activities. However, I do worry about whether over time it will damage the display panel.

Since it takes advantage of the iPhone’s OLED screen, it doesn’t burn through the battery either.

Ticktick app review