Five years ago, a TikTok video changed my life.

And I can say that without any hyperbole.

The run up

In April of 2020, while the world was struggling through the early stages of the COVID pandemic I launched an app for creating highly customizable complications for the Apple Watch. Watchsmith was my attempt at filling the void left by the lack of 3rd-party watch faces on watchOS.

It let you chose from loads of different colors, fonts and display types to make your watch face your own.

The app did alright commercially at launch, it was a niche app for a niche purpose. Much like many of my other apps at the time, I was building things which I wanted to exist and hoping that they’d find some audience with folks who had similar needs and desires.

Then that June at WWDC Apple announced iOS 14 and with it the introduction of a new widgets system for iOS. For the very first time iPhone users had the ability to personalize the look of their home screens (beyond their choice in wallpaper).

This then kicked off a busy summer for me adapting the work I’d done for Watchsmith to iOS. Because Watchsmith was my first first top to bottom SwiftUI app I could actually re-use a lot of the code between the two and so by mid-July I had the early prototypes of this ready:

I’m planning to bring the customization options of @WatchsmithApp to widgets this fall. Since the complications are now all SwiftUI there is a ton of shared code and functionality between them. Got the first few types translated to test out the concept and seems to work great. pic.twitter.com/aYzRiDVRks

— David Smith (@_DavidSmith) July 14, 2020

I was very much viewing this as a project which would have a similar lifespan as Watchsmith. I was building a niche tool for a niche users. I thought it was a good idea, and one I’d enjoy using myself, but at this point my expectations for it were still very managed.

When Apple announced that their September event would be on September 15, I thought I was mostly ready. I had a good basic version of the app with most of the feature-set copied over my Watchsmith.

I remember watching the video keynote, enjoying it as it went right up until this moment when Tim said:

…tomorrow! Usually we get a few days between when Apple releases their final “Gold Master” versions of an iOS version and when it will come out to the public. But in this case we had less than 24 hours to get our apps submitted, approved and ready for the world.

So I frantically got to work on final touches and build and at 5:54pm, I got it submitted.

Phew.

Then 6 hours later (at 11:30pm) Widgetsmith was approved by Apple, ready for when iOS 14 would be released the next day.

The Initial Response

So at 4:21PM on Wednesday, September 16, I hit release for Widgetsmith v1.0. The app launched as part of a much wider release schedule I was mananging at the time with updates for Pedometer++, Sleep++ and Watchsmith all going out that same day.

Introducing Widgetsmith. Fully customizable, scheduleable widgets for iOS 14, including widgets for Date, Time, Weather, Calendar, Reminders, Health, Tides & Astronomy. You choose the fonts, colors and appearance. Take control of your home screen. https://t.co/7BLTa31r3z pic.twitter.com/hUIbn01x3I

— David Smith (@_DavidSmith) September 16, 2020

The initial response to the app was warm but nothing out of the ordinary. Widgetsmith was the 59th app I had launched so I’d been through this process a lot over the preceding twelve years of indie app development. Typically you see a little swell of interest in the first few days. Then things settle down into a stable level and you move onto the maintenance and gradual improvement of the app.

This was what I thought would happen with Widgetsmith and the indications for the first few days were that this was exactly what would happen.

So the next day I left home with my family for our first proper holiday since the start of the pandemic, heading down to the beach.

The Turn

That Friday (September 18) I awoke and went about my morning like normal. Checking in on things a bit here and there but mostly enjoying some welcome down-time with my family. We went for a walk in a local nature preserve and generally had a nice quiet day.

It wasn’t until we got back from our walk that I had my first indication that something was up. Someone reached out to me on Twitter saying they’d seen Widgetsmith getting mentioned on TikTok. I click through to the video they linked to and discovered that there was a walkthrough video by Katarina Mogus which was going viral at the moment. Her video showed how to use Widgetsmith to make your home screen look Aesthetic AF.

@katamogz Reply to @an.elementopqrs #ios14 #ios14update #iphonetricks #iphonehack #ios14homescreen #learnontiktok ♬ Daisy (I’m Crazy But You Like That) - Ashnikko

I then open my helpdesk page and I am shocked by what I see. There are new emails coming in at a rate of multiple per second. A literal waterfall of customer outreach. I can’t even tap on things because the rate is too high. I am rather bamboozled at to what exactly is happening but at this point I realize something is different.

Widgetsmith had taken off in a way I could never have had the imagination to hope for. It was everywhere. It was being mentioned in the news, I even recall it getting a shout out in Vogue. Complete madness.

Widgetsmith quickly became the #1 App in the App Store, and remarkably stayed there for a couple of weeks.

I will be forever grateful for the App Store for the opportunity it allowed me. It still, to this day, doesn’t seem like it should be possible for a solo, indie developer to build something on their laptop. Hit submit, and then have it end up on over a hundred million people’s phones.

Five Years Since

The initial few weeks after Widgetsmith’s launch are a bit of a blur to me now. I remember frantically coding up requested features, trying to keep up with the outreach, and generally trying to keep everything holding together.

Eventually things settled down out of the frantic stage and into new only-slightly-frantic stage. The app matured and developed and I was able to craft and adjust it towards the features its newly found audience wanted. What I had built as a niche tool for niche users had become a mainstream tool for mainstream users.

I wasn’t ever really sure if it would be a flash in the pan, a meteoric rise followed by a meteoric crash. Happily, five years on I can report that it was not a flash in the pan. Widgetsmith’s usage and userbase continues to grow. As of my writing this the app has received around 131 million downloads.

I continue to find enjoyment from coming up with ways to enhance and improve the app. Most recently with a fresh new re-design for iOS 26 and support for the new Liquid Glass widget styles.

I have no idea how long Widgetsmith will continue to be relevant, but I do know for sure that I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities and experience it has provided me.

All summer I’ve been chronicling my iOS 26 redesigns. With the September event just around the corner I am delighted to report that I was able to complete my work for both Pedometer++ and Widgetsmith.

The final styling of each redesign is different between the two apps but in both cases I feel like they landed on a solid interpretation of the new Liquid Glass design language.

I figured the best way to explain the design I went with for Pedometer++ was to make a short video walking through the design and narrating my thought processes for some of the major screens in the app:

watchOS 10 Redux

The funny thing about working on my Liquid Glass redesign for the Pedometer++ watchOS app is how very little needs to actually be done. A couple of years ago with watchOS 10 Apple introduced a very similar design language, with edge-to-edge backgrounds and frosted overlays. This redesign also carried with it the underlying nudge to move away from any form of custom navigation and instead rely on system provided mechanisms.

So when I did a simple rebuild of the project with Xcode 26 the result for many of my screens was already pretty close. Here’s the main current steps screen.

Other than the buttons going from the flat frosted material to the glassy sheen there is very little which initially needs to be done here. Similarly, the basic workout screen has a similar result.

Route Planner

Where things start to get slightly more interesting is when I look at some of the more sophisticated screens in the app. For example the route planner screen.

Here the initial step is the same to switch the corner buttons to glass.

But what to do with that distance indicator at the bottom? My instincts here is that there are really two ways to approach an element like this: blend it into the device frame or harmonize it with the glassy buttons.

Blending it into the device frame would look like this:

Which works visually but also feels like it might be contrary to the general watchOS design language where we aren’t supposed to be emphasizing black edges of the device. So let’s try glass instead:

That feels very harmonious. I’m not 100% convinced though as it does feel slightly odd. The glass texture and effect is continuing to be changed and developed with each successive beta, so I don’t want to make any decisions based on its current look. Instead, what I’m thinking I’ll do is leave it there for now and see what it is like in a few betas time.

Workout Chooser

Another place where there are subtle changes which need to be made is in the start workout chooser. Again the starting version has the watchOS 10 frosted material look.

One area I’m still struggling a bit with in Liquid Glass is exactly when to use which variant of the glassy texture. This feels like a place where some glass is in order.

I start with the prominent glass variant.

But that feels too heavy and a visually distracting. So maybe a lightly tinted variant of the regular glassy style.

I like that. It draws colors from the background but still gives each workout type a distinct flavor.

Metric Chooser

I have found that the contrast between the prominent and muted variants of glass really work well for indicating state changes. In the metric chooser there is a list of entries which you can choose between for display, with each either enabled or disabled.

I found that using a prominent style for selected and a muted for unselected visually is really clear.

Additionally, the transition between the two states is visually gorgeous.

Workout Controls

The workout control screen is another place where I found myself wrestling between different button styles and prominences. Here is the starting point:

A straight forward conversion to Liquid Glass buttons would look like this:

Which is pretty solid. The next thing I explored was to have the button icons all the same color.

Nope, don’t like that. Maybe in a brighter button mode?

That actually works pretty well. But maybe they should be circles?

No, I think that makes them visually too small. These buttons are used in a dynamic physical context during workouts, so larger touch targets are almost certainly better.

So here they are all in the bright mode. That works alright, but I think is just too bright and bold. So I think I’ll go back to the initial conversion for now.

Future ideas…

That is it for where I’ll leave the core parts of the app for now. This transition from a watchOS 10 design to watchOS 26 has been relatively straightforward.

Where things start to get interesting is with the longer term ideas I have for the app. These likely won’t ship with the September updates, where I’m expecting to mostly ship an updated variant of the current app. Nevertheless I’m starting to think about them, here’s a little preview of some of the ideas I’m playing with:

Next up is the active workouts screen. This is shown when the user is out on a walk, hike or run. It uses their iPhone to track the metrics associated with the effort. It also includes route finding features to help with navigation.

It seemed like the best place to start looking for some inspiration would be in the Apple Maps app, which does essentially the same thing…just without the backcountry and fitness abilities.

The overall direction of map focused with glass overlay seemed like the obvious place to start. So first to go is the bottom section, to be replaced by a floating glass panel.

NB: These screenshots were mostly taken with Beta 2, so had a much stronger glass effect, the last ones were Beta 3 where Liquid Glass turned into Frosted Glass.

I tried to make the top panel also have a glass background but I find that doesn’t look quite right and feels a bit disjointed.

So instead I tried to mirror more of the Apple Maps during a navigation session look with the status on the bottom.

That’s much better. In this early draft I tried putting the end and pause buttons on the top like I have in a number of other views for closing map editors…looking at that now that was an awful idea which thankfully later on I will remedy in due course. But until then I experimented with adding a fuller metric display here.

But I think that is visually not as nice and I’m not sure is super helpful.

So streamlined things and added in the maps buttons for controlling route selection, weather and basemap.

I then had the good sense to bring down the workout control buttons to the bottom of sheet. They are hidden when the sheet is collapse and visible when the user taps or pulls up on it.

I played around with adding the additional metrics in the expanded sheet. I was recreating a feature in the old version where you could get a just text display (hiding the map entirely). Visually I’m not in love with this.

But I think the map view is too crowded with all those buttons, so let’s pull them down into the bottom panel, hidden by default.

I tried having the weather display up in the corner (like the Apple Maps app). But I also feel like the two lines of metrics is too much. Instead, I’m going to make the shown metrics configurable, allowing the user to see what they like here.

The buttons in the bottom feel a bit unbalanced so I played around with their button styles.

When I showed this design to a designer friend (Ben), who has much better design sense than I do, they pointed out that arranging the buttons horizontally would make for larger targets, ideal for users who are working out and might not be as precise with their taps.

That was better but then we iterated a few more times on the idea. Drawing inspiration from the Apple Workouts cycling mode screen.

I really like emphasizing the pause button as it is likely the one to be hit most often and the circular arrangement feels good too.

That is where I’ll leave it for now. That feels very streamlined and clean. The core functionality is all still here but in a very easy to read, map focused way.

Next up for my speed run of iOS 26 first draft redesigns is the main Home Screen of Pedometer++.

This one proved pretty straightforward, at least to get to the solid draft stage.

The initial step was to adopt the new Tab Bar design. Pedometer++ had previously used a completely custom tab bar control, which caused all manner of complexity and trouble. So this seems like the opportune time to switch back to the system one, especially since it is so glassy and a hallmark of the new look.

Similarly the top navigation bar buttons are adapted to the new button shapes and looks.

Note that the tab bar tint being blue is just an artifact of the way SwiftUI Previews work, in the app it is actually green.

Right away this is looking pretty much at home in the new design language. But there is something which bothers me a bit. All the empty white space feels a bit expansive in a less useful way. One of the features of the old design was that the top bar would tint based on your current day’s goal performance. I try to have visual clues and encouragements in the UI to help motivate you to reach your step goal.

So let’s try making the whole background rather than white, a tinted color matching the current goal state.

Here it is way overdone on purpose to show what I mean.

Or here it is adapted to each of the red, orange, green states at a more appropriate level of strength. I think that overall works better. Especially for the glassy controls, they seem to work really well against something which has some color. On completely white they drop a bit of their distinctiveness and are harder to quickly identify as buttons.

Lastly I just need to clean up the backgrounds of a few of the views which were previously assuming a white background and so now look a bit weird (like in the streak length marker label). Also, I think the title text needs to be a bit bigger to better balance with the button sizes.

That’s pretty solid. I like it, it feels ‘new’ but not in a way which I think will cause confusion or complaint. This root screen is the heart of Pedometer++, and has been very similar for nearly 10 years now. I want to be very conservative with updating it, so as not to cause customer frustration.

Here is a before and after: