Using Smart Rotate with Widget Stacks

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can have a stack of widgets show you the most relevant widget based on what you’re doing. This is all done with smart rotate. Let’s see how smart rotate works with stacks of widgets on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone.

So I’m looking at my home screen here. We can see that I have a couple of widgets. This particular widget here is a stack. I can swipe through it to go through the different widgets within that stack.

Well, when you create a stack, there’s an option for smart rotate. This is going to be turned on by default. What does smart rotate do? Well, it uses machine learning or Siri knowledge to show you the widget based on what you are doing. As an example, you get up in the morning. The first thing you do is check the weather. What the iPhone will eventually do is show you the weather widget for thing in the morning. Let’s say you work out at the end of the day. You have your activity widget there, from your Apple watch or fitness widget. The iPhone will show you that fitness widget towards the end of the day when you start working out – automatically. This is what smart rotate is. It will show you different widgets based on Siri knowledge or machine learning. Now, again, this is turned on by default.

If you do not want to use smart rotate, maybe you want to decide which widgets just are going to be shown. What you can do is turn that off. To do that, what you have to do is you have to edit the stack. How do we do that? We tap and hold on the widget that we want to edit. So I tap and hold on this. And then in the menu that pops up, you’re going to see Edit Stack. I tap on this and being that this is a stack, you’re going to see up at the top smart rotate. And if we go over to the right, you’re going to see that this is turned on. When you create a stack, this is going to be turned on by default. To turn it off so that your stack of widgets do not rotate automatically, you tap on the slide right here and now closes the iPhone will no longer change the widget based on what I am doing. The only way that the widgets will change in that stack is if I swipe through them myself.

So that’s a look at smart rotate. When we create a stack of widgets, smart rotate will be turned on by default. With smart rotate, the iPhone will show you the most relevant widget within that stack based on what you are doing. It uses Siri knowledge or machine learning to decide which widget to show. If you want to turn smart rotate off and choose your own widget to show. Then what you do is you go to edit that stack and turn off smart rotate.

So that’s a look at smart rotate with widget stacks on the iPhone.