How to Add or Edit a Smart Widget Stack on iPhone

For the first time in iPhone history, iOS 14 brings the ability to add widgets to the Home screen. These widgets come in various sizes and convey a lot of useful information even though they don’t contain any interactive elements. To make things even better, you can use Smart Stack to maximize the iPhone’s Home screen experience. If you’re wondering how to add or edit the smart widget stack, you’ve come to the right place.

In case you were wondering, Smart Stack ‘intelligently’ switches between widgets based on past activity. For example, you might have a habit of opening the Reminders app with a Smart Stack in the morning, expecting the Reminders widgets to open just then. Your iPhone uses machine learning to power the Smart Stack, so don’t be surprised to see the right widget at the right time.

Also, a Smart Stack helps reduce the clutter of multiple widgets as you can manually scroll up or down a stack to get to the widget you want.

Let’s check out how you should go about adding and editing Smart Stacks on iPhone. We’ll also show you how to create your own custom widget stacks from scratch.

How to Add Smart Stack in iOS 14

iOS 14 comes with a stack of Smart widgets ready to use and ready to use. You can add it to the home screen like any other widget.

Start by long pressing an empty area of ​​the Home screen to shake all the app icons. Then tap the plus-shaped icon in the upper left corner of the screen.

You should see the widget gallery. Tap on Smart Stack you should see at the top.

Choose a size (small or medium) and then tap Add Widget to add the Smart Stack to the Home screen.

Once you’ve placed the Smart Stack, feel free to move it to the Home screen or to a completely different page.

You can also add multiple Smart Stacks; this is ideal if you want it to be on different Home screen pages.

Open the widget gallery—since you have already added a Smart Stack, you will no longer see it listed at the top of the gallery. So type ‘smart stack’ in the Search Widgets field to make it appear. Next, choose a size and tap Add Widget.

Note: You can also add a Smart widget stack to the Today View (if you don’t already have one), shake the screen, open the widgets list, select Smart Stack, then tap Add Widget. Today View is the only way to add and use Smart Stacks on iPad where you cannot add widgets to the Home screen.

Remove Widgets from Smart Stack

The Smart Stacks you add to the home screen contain lots of widgets. You may not use some of them at all. In this case, you can quite easily remove such widgets that you do not intend to use. There are two ways to do this.

The first method involves manually scrolling through the stack until you reach the widget you want to remove – let’s choose the Stocks widget as an example. Next, long-press on Smart Stack and select Remove Stocks. Tap Uninstall to confirm.

If you have multiple widgets that you want to remove quickly, it’s best to select the Edit Stack option in the long-press context menu. Then in the list of widgets displayed, swipe the unwanted widgets to the left of the screen and then tap Delete.

Once you’re done removing the unwanted widgets, swipe down to exit the Home screen.

Change Smart Stack Order

When manually scrolling through a Smart Stack, you may not like the order in which each widget appears. Fortunately, you can change the default ordering.

Start by long pressing the stack; Tap Edit Stack in the context menu that appears.

Then tap and hold the handles next to each listed widget to drag them in any order. Swipe down to exit the home screen.

Disable Smart Stack

You can choose to scroll within a Smart Stack instead of letting the widgets rotate automatically. In this case, you can disable the ‘smart’ functionality of a widget.

Long-press the Smart Stack, select Edit Stack, and then turn off the switch next to Smart Rotation.

Go to the home screen and Smart Stack will no longer display useful widgets by itself. If you want functionality back, go back to the widget edit screen and turn on Smart Rotation.

Create a Custom Smart Stack

Instead of adding a Smart Stack from the widget gallery, you can create your own custom ‘smart’ stack. If you already have widgets on your iPhone’s Home screen, drag and drop a widget onto another widget of similar size to start stacking.

Repeat the process to stack with the widgets you want. You can also drag and drop widgets over others of the same size while adding them to the Home screen via the widget gallery.

This is how you build your own ‘smart’ widget stack. Feel free to build as much as you want. Custom-built widget stacks work like Smart Stacks that you add through the widget page.

In a custom widget stack, you can change the order, delete widgets, and even disable Smart Rotation.

Delete Smart Stack

If you are no longer using the Smart Stack, you can quickly get rid of it.

Long press on Smart Stack and then tap Remove Stack. Tap Uninstall again to confirm.

Be smart

Rather than scattering multiple widgets around the home screen and making them distract you all the time, choosing Smart Stack helps you reduce clutter and focus your attention on the most important widgets. Smart Stacks may still show the wrong widgets at first, but give them some time to ‘learn’ from your iPhone interactions; so you get a great user experience.

Next: Downloading iPhone apps alone? Here’s how to stop it.