WidgetPod - Music Widget 4+

I like the widget customisation but......I don’t like when I use the track controls it flicks to the app for a fraction of a second, I’m pretty sure this can be eliminated and I would like to see it done for aesthetic and smooth widget running purposes. It’s not really “pro” if it don’t work “pro”

I completely understand that the flickering animation must be annoying, but it’s sadly due to an iOS limitation. 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.

Thanks for reviewing.

Downloaded this app as I think the concept is great and visually it looks appealing with a good range of customisation, BUT…

Unfortunately there are a range of small and significant gestures that don’t work - the main one being no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the widget to update to display what I was actually playing at any given moment.

I’m no expert, and so I fully accept that there may have been an element of user error - however I’m also not an idiot so if I can’t get a paid app functioning relatively easily then it is as much an issue with the app as it is with the user.

Other minor irritations (aside from the fact I couldn’t find out it didn’t work without the in-app purchase, since the ‘try before you buy’ lets you play with the customisation but not actually display the widget) are that you have the option to change the action when you tap the widget, however whatever you set it to it still seems to just open the app.

I’ve given two stars as, if it works, the idea is great - but for now I’m afraid I wouldn’t recommend.

Thanks for the detailed review.

About the issue with live updating, unfortunately that’s no longer working due to a change in iOS 16 which prevents us from updating the widget live when the app is in the background. That’s why we did offer the option to choose Refresh Widget as tap action. We thought it was a bug in iOS 16 that would be fixed in future versions of iOS but now it seems intentional.

Thanks for reviewing.

I think this should be able to work without having the WidgetPod app open. Could be making use of the background app refresh function or using information provided by control centre/lock screen media controls.

Response to Developer:

What I mean is, that I hope there is a way for the widget to display the current song without needing the app to be open in a future update. Background app refresh may work slightly different to what I thought, so thanks for clarifying.

Good to see you like the app.

While iOS itself has access to the data of any app that’s playing music, third party apps are not allowed to read that data, we haven’t been provided with the APIs to do so. Hope you understand.

Would you possibly help us understand what exactly do you mean by using background app refresh? Because I’m not sure if you know this but background app refresh doesn’t keep an app running in background all the time, it simply means that an app, if needed can do some routine tasks in the background in Intervals whenever iOS permits it. In case of WidgetPod it wouldn’t really be any useful, because the widgets themselves have a refresh interval of 5 mins in case the App isn’t running. If the app is running, widgets update live as the song changes.

Hope that explains things.

Thank you for reviewing.