Spotify iOS 14 Widget: Auto-Updating Now Available

Spotify has now made available its much-awaited iOS 14 widget following the latest application update. This new widget, currently offered in small and medium sizes, provides instant access to your recently played artists, albums, and podcasts with a single touch.

The smaller version of the widget will showcase your most recently listened-to content. The medium-sized widget, conversely, will display your five most recent selections – presented as four horizontal items with the newest at the top. Selecting the thumbnail of any of these five items will directly take you to that specific page within the Spotify application for immediate playback.

A noteworthy feature of the widget is its ability to dynamically adjust its background color to complement the artwork of the displayed content. For instance, if an artist’s album features prominent red tones, the widget’s background will shift to red. Similarly, a blue album cover will result in a blue widget background, and so forth.

However, the range of available colors appears to be somewhat limited. During testing, when playing content with a grayscale image (such as Taylor Swift’s “folklore”), the widget defaulted to Spotify’s signature green color.

The widget’s vibrant color scheme is designed to make it visually prominent on your home screen. Nevertheless, this could present a challenge for users who have carefully curated their iOS 14 home screens with a specific aesthetic, such as a neutral color palette or a preferred color like pink, purple, blue, or black.

Current trends on Etsy indicate that iOS 14 customization packs featuring neutral and autumnal colors are currently popular, as are those with lighter pinks and dark themes in black. Spotify’s widget may not always align seamlessly with these design choices.

The anticipation for a Spotify widget was considerable, as evidenced by the surge in popularity of a third-party music widget provider prior to the official release. TuneTrack, a competing widget application, climbed as high as No. 8 overall and No. 1 in the Music category on September 19, 2020, coinciding with the peak of the iOS 14 customization trend and a wave of new downloads.

The new Spotify widget is now available as part of the updated Spotify app on the iOS App Store.