Can we get a modern iOS Widget already?!

They’ve been out for what, 5 years now? I gave a lot of grace for a lot of years, but it’s really getting ridiculous. Nearly every app I have supports iOS widgets now. And they can be displayed on my macbook desktop now, so they’re even MORE useful.
Maybe open source the iOS app if it’s so difficult to do, I’m sure some of your users could help you figure it out.

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Check this out: Custom Beeminder iOS widget

Let me know what would you like to see on the widget and I’ll try to help.

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I have considered and even implemented a few things like this, but it’s hard to get it to do exactly what I would expect from an iOS widget. Urgency load is also not quite what I need.
I’d like to be able to have a widget that shows each goal in “time to derail” order, complete with color and name.
Really, it’s not that much to ask the devs (who I have given far too much money to over the years!) to implement a simple feature that nearly every other iOS app has managed to implement!!

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I can understand your frustration. Since Beeminder has become such an important tool for many of us, it can be really hard when it doesn’t quite work the way we would like it to.

Anyway, since you mentioned it, the iOS app is indeed open source, and being actively improved by @theospears:

https://github.com/beeminder/BeeSwift

Unfortunately I’m an Android user myself, so I don’t have any specific suggestions for how to set things up on iOS the way you’d like.

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Hi! I definitely understand the frustration when there’s something you really want to see and we’re not adding it. There’s stuff that I as a user would love to see that seems pretty far away still, and it really sucks, when to me it seems obvious and vital.

That said, with my Support Czar hat on, we’ve only ever had a handful of requests through to support about adding iOS widgets, though – five, to be precise, in all the 7,781-and-counting feedback items I’ve logged since 2019 – so as far as I can tell from our feedback tracker, it’s not something that’s immediately obvious as something that people are keen on. That obviously affects how viable something seems, when we’re looking for things that are a high return on investment.

That kind of thing does matter in whether we implement things or change direction on things, so anyone seeing this should definitely consider it a nudge for people to let us know when you’re interested in something. I think sometimes users assume we must be planning to do something because it’s obvious, and then never tell us it’s something they want. But that way we don’t see any demand for it, so it falls behind things where there is an obvious demand. We always assume there are people we aren’t hearing from, of course, but that goes for all feedback.

The other thing is that there’s a reason that the apps aren’t fully featured: that’s expensive to implement, to maintain, and to support. I’ve worked for other companies too, and the apps caused a massive amount of pain, to the detriment of the actual product. Every feature added is a huge drag on even keeping the app up to the standards of the app store, etc. So any addition is a step I’ve urged us not to take until we’re sure we can support it, and not just in the immediate moment, but on an ongoing basis. (Sorry!)

I’m not saying that widgets specifically are never happening (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen conversation about those and wishlists for getting them implemented, recently), just that that’s one of the considerations as well on anything that adds to the basic functionality of the companion app, which we specifically position as such. So it’s something we do pretty cautiously, frustrating as that is.

I hope at least that getting a glimpse of how the sausage is made helps explain what seems like inaction on this front! :sweat_smile:

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Wow, @patimen, you’re getting some really gracious answers here, considering the petulant-three-year-old tone of your request.

Someone had to say it.

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“Someone had to say it”.
Look, it was indeed a gracious answer, more than I deserved perhaps. But I had really assumed that some 5 years would be enough to address this. It seems I’ve overestimated how much people care about this feature, and as I said, I’m more than willing to look into contributing myself to make this happen.

And I certainly get that every feature is a liability, I’ve been doing software for quite a while. It’s just that when every other new app I download these days, even little one-dev tools, already includes the new widgets, I feel like this can’t be THAT hard. Maybe my opinion will change once I look into the tech part of it myself.

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And to the Beeminder team, apologies how strong I came across. I’ve got an Elgato StreamDeck plugin coming soon for Beeminder, maybe that can make it up to you. :slight_smile:

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Here’s a preview of the plugin (not yet published to the marketplace):

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Here’s another option, in case someone stumbles across this thread in the future looking for a solution:

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