The latest and greatest of iOS is now on your iPhone or iPad, and you are totally ready to take it out for a spin. But then you start experiencing problems with your lock screen or the widgets and notification feature. You swipe to the left from the home screen, and there’s supposed to be the widgets view. But the thing is that none of them populate with any data. Not News, Weather, not even Siri App Suggestions, and certainly not any third-party app widgets—just nothing!
You discover that your widgets are not working or they fail to populate then start working again and then fail to fill-in yet once again–all for no apparent reason. What the heck? It’s so frustrating to find yourself in this place, we know. So here are some suggestion to help get your widgets up and running, so you get that test drive iOS experience!
So without further ado, let’s walk through some steps to fix our widgets not working problems
Contents
- 1 Widgets Not Working After iOS Download or Update
- 2 Weather Widgets Not Working
- 3 News Widgets Not Working
- 4 News Widget Says Unable to Load on iPhone
- 5 All Widgets Not Working
- 6 Widgets Still Not Working
- 7 A Final Offering for Widgets Not Working
- 8 Quick Tips
- 9 How-To Restrict Access to your iPhone Widgets
- 10 Summary
- 11 Let Us Know
Related Articles
Widgets Not Working After iOS Download or Update
After downloading the latest iOS, the device starts, and we navigate to the widgets lock screen. But we discover that our widgets are completely blank…nothing..nada. Most of our widgets are blank, not anywhere near the content rich experience we see in the Apple Picture above.
Our initial widgets search screen looked like this! Not good at all.
If you are experiencing the same issue, here are some suggested tips:
Weather Widgets Not Working
If your weather widget is empty, please make sure that you have the location services turned on. Tap on your Settings > Privacy > Location Services . Turn on the toggle for location services. Without this, the weather widget does not show any information on your lock screen.
News Widgets Not Working
If you have the News widget on your lock screen and it is showing up blank like the picture above, Go to Settings > Notifications. Choose to allow Notifications and Set the Show on Lock Screen to ON. If you are using News for the first time, make sure to open the app and choose your channels.
News Widget Says Unable to Load on iPhone
This is another weird error that shows up on the iPhone while trying to open the News app. If you encounter this issue, your best bet is to sign out of your iCloud account. Open the news widget next and set it up as if it is a brand new account, then sign into your iCloud to complete. That should fix the issue. Your preferences and favorites get reset when you do this and for some reason, that fixes the issue.
All Widgets Not Working
A strange but true tip that seems to work for a lot of folks is toggling on “Bold Text” in the Display & Brightness setting.
Another oddball suggestion is to go to your regional settings and change your language and then change it back (I switch from U.S. English to Canadian English and back again). Go to Settings > General > Language & Region > iPhone Language and modify the language. This tip has worked each time to repopulate the widgets.
Widgets Still Not Working
Once you have explored the notification settings of the widgets, Press the home button and wake/sleep button for 10 seconds or so and let your iDevice restart. Restarting the device often fixes your widget content problem in iOS 10+.
A Final Offering for Widgets Not Working
The introduction of iOS10 finally gave us iFolks the power to delete stock apps. So if none of the above steps worked for you, let’s give this one a whirl and remove and then reinstall. Performing this also deletes the widget so by reinstalling a current version of the app, we just might correct the widget issue.
We recommend deleting the problematic app (and widget) and THEN restart the iDevice. Once restarted, open the App Store, look for the deleted app in your purchases and download/install the app again. After reinstalling and launching the app, check if the widget functions normally.
Several readers report success with this method, particularly for faulty News app widgets.
Quick Tips
- Add Widgets Quickly using 3D Touch!
- Just touch the apps’ icon and look for the option “Add Widget.”
- No more visiting the main widgets screen to add a new app widget
- Show More or Less
- Some widgets include a “Show More” or “Show Less” option in the top right corner
- If you want more info, tap “Show More.”
- If you want less info, tap “Show Less.”
- iOS remembers your selection, so next time you widget should follow your previous selection of “Show More” or “Show Less.”
How-To Restrict Access to your iPhone Widgets
The iOS 10 design provides you with quick access to all your information without logging in and opening each of the apps. Your locked screen gives you a quick glance at your news, weather, emails, messages and other notifications.
The default setting here does not require a passcode to access this information. Anybody that has access to your iPhone or iPad can peek and glance at your private information.
Here is how you can restrict access to your locked screen and all its widgets and make sure that your private information is not leaked via the widgets on your locked screen.
Step – 1 Tap on Settings > Passcode and enter your passcode
Step – 2 On this screen you control how you can restrict access to information on the locked screen. There are four options under the section “Allow Access when Locked.”
Step – 3 By switching off the “Today View” you can make sure that no one has access to your widgets on your locked screen without the right passcode. You can also turn off the Notifications from appearing on your locked screen here by switching off the “Notifications View.”
Summary
It’s always a good idea to do a reset if you are starting out with a new iOS update. Thankfully with these quick tips, the widgets in our lock screen now have something to say:
If looking for a basic hands-on guide for iOS 10, check out this post!
If you are looking for new widgets to check out, please take our post on the widgets search screen.
We have updated our master guide for all iOS 10 related troubleshooting. If you are having problems with installing iOS 10, or other app problems after installing iOS 10, Please check our step by step iOS 10 problem fixing guide.
Let Us Know
What’s your experience with iOS 10 so far? What features are you enjoying? What problems are frustrating you? Let us know in the comments below.
