Apollo Brings the Best of Reddit to iOS 14’s Widgets

Christian Selig, developer of the excellent Reddit client Apollo, has always been deeply connected with his users and Reddit culture on the whole. Many of Apollo’s updates focus on the kind of nit-picky features and tweaks that heavy users of the app and platform care about. So it should come as no surprise that in building iOS 14 widgets for Apollo, Selig took inspiration from some of the things people love most about Reddit.

Apollo offers a whopping seven different types of widgets, roughly half of which are the sort of widgets you would expect – displaying posts from your favorite subreddit or providing launchers into different subreddits – while the other half specialize in bringing the best of Reddit to your Home Screen.

Let’s start with the fun ones: Wallpaper, Showerthoughts, and Jokes.

Various configurations of Apollo’s Wallpaper widget.

Wallpaper, which is available in small, medium, and large sizes, works like Apple’s own Photos widget by displaying different random images throughout the day. Rather than relying on your own photo library though, Apollo’s widget pulls from the vast reaches of image-heavy subreddits. Installing the Wallpaper widget enables spontaneous surprise and delight at different points of day as you’re shown different beautiful photos you’ve never seen before.

What’s especially nice about the Wallpaper widget is that it can be configured to show different types of images. By default it’s set to Photography, but you can change it to one of four other built-in options: Wallpapers, Art, Animals, and Nature. Additionally, there’s a Custom option where you can list multiple subreddits that you want the widget to pull from. The first custom option I set up was for memes.1

Widget gold.

Knowledge is power, and with Apollo’s Showerthoughts and Jokes widgets you can benefit from the endless knowledge shared by Redditors in the areas of deep insight and humor. We all have our best insights while in the shower, right? Now you can have other people’s wisdom delivered directly to your Home Screen throughout each day, whether you’re taking a shower or not. And who couldn’t use more laughs in their life? A free, endless stream of jokes can now fill your device, and by extension your heart.

As if the above widgets weren’t enough, Apollo offers all of the standard utility you could hope for in its four other widget types: Posts, Multiple Posts, Post Feed Grid, and Subreddit Shortcuts.

Post and subreddit launcher widgets.

The first three, as you probably guessed, display lists or grids of posts from the feeds of your choosing, with options like your Home feed, Popular, All, or a specific subreddit or group of subreddits. My favorites are the large Multiple Posts widget and the medium Post Feed Grid widget, both of which look very sleek and change backgrounds based on your device being in light or dark mode.

The Subreddit Shortcuts widget, funnily enough, resembles the widgets offered by Apple’s own Shortcuts app, with grids of subreddits displayed as colorful buttons that you can tap to quickly launch that subreddit. The small widget can feature only a single subreddit, but the medium and large support up to six and fourteen, respectively. It’s worth noting that all the widgets mentioned above similarly support tapping a displayed piece of content to open Apollo straight to that content.

As if Apollo’s fantastic set of widgets wasn’t enough, the app’s latest update also added a variety of other great features, like Picture in Picture support for videos, the ability to cross-post between subreddits, five lovely new app icons, and a lot more.

But since widgets are taking over the Internet, it only felt appropriate for me to give the people what they want: all of that sweet widget coverage.

Whether it’s for the widgets, or Picture in Picture, or one of the app’s many other strengths, there’s no reason to look further than Apollo for your Reddit needs.

Because really Christian, how could you leave out memes? ↩︎