How to Create an iOS Lock Screen Widget?

This article is originally published at swiftsenpai.com

In iOS 16, Apple has given the Lock Screen a massive overhaul. One of the most anticipated features that come along with the overhaul is the Lock Screen widgets. As the name implies, Lock Screen widgets are widgets that display glanceable content that is constantly visible on the iPhone and iPad Lock Screen.

Since both the Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets are powered by WidgetKit, the way of creating a Lock Screen widget is very similar to how we create a Home Screen widget. Therefore, in this article, I won’t be showing you how to set up and create a widget from scratch as that has been covered in my previous article.

Instead, I will be focusing on showing you how to update your existing Home Screen widgets’ code to support Lock Screen widgets.

With all that being said, let’s get started!

A Quick Recap

For demonstration purposes, let’s update the View Size Widget that I created in my previous article. As a quick recap, the View Size Widget is a static Home Screen widget that displays the widget’s view size. Here’s how it looks: