How to Create and Customise Smart Stacks of Widgets on iPhone

Widgets on the iPhone Home Screen offer immediate glimpses into calendar appointments, battery levels, weather forecasts, and to-do lists without launching applications. However, placing multiple standalone widgets across your screens can rapidly crowd out your favourite app icons, creating cluttered home pages. In iOS, Apple solved this screen real estate dilemma with Smart Stacks—a dynamic widget container that stacks up to ten widgets directly on top of each other in the space of a single tile, automatically rotating throughout the day to show relevant information based on your habits.

How Smart Stacks Function on iOS

A Smart Stack combines multiple widgets into an interactive rotating deck:

• Smart Rotate: On-device machine intelligence observes your daily routines, automatically rotating the stack to show the Calendar widget during morning meetings, Maps during your evening commute, and Music when you connect headphones.
• Widget Suggestions: iOS can proactively suggest and display an unpinned widget in the stack when an important real-time event occurs (such as severe weather alerts or flight updates).
• Manual Swiping: You can swipe vertically up or down on the stack at any moment to browse through your stacked widgets manually.

How to Add a Pre-Built Smart Stack to Your Home Screen

Apple provides a pre-assembled Smart Stack populated with default Apple apps:

1. Press and hold down on any empty area of your iPhone Home Screen until the app icons begin to jiggle (entering “jiggle mode”).
2. Tap the + (plus) button in the upper left corner of the screen.
3. In the widget gallery, tap Smart Stack near the top of the suggested list.
4. Swipe horizontally to choose your preferred widget size: Small (2×2), Medium (4×2), or Large (4×4).
5. Tap Add Widget, position the stack on your home screen, and tap Done in the top right corner.

How to Build a Custom Stack by Dragging Widgets Together

You are not limited to Apple’s pre-made selections; you can build custom stacks using any third-party or native widgets of identical size:

1. Enter jiggle mode on your Home Screen.
2. Add your first desired widget (e.g., Spotify medium widget).
3. Add a second widget of the exact same size (e.g., Reminders medium widget).
4. Click and drag the second widget directly on top of the first widget until a distinct bounding box highlights them together.
5. Release the widget. They are now merged into a custom two-card stack. You can repeat this process to stack up to ten widgets together.

Customising Stack Order, Smart Rotate, and Suggestions

To fine-tune which widgets appear and disable unwanted automated rotations:

1. Long-press directly on your Smart Stack widget until the contextual menu appears.
2. Select Edit Stack.
3. To delete a widget, tap the minus (–) badge on its preview card.
4. To reorder, drag the three-line grab handles on the right edge of each listed widget up or down.
5. Toggle Smart Rotate off if you prefer the stack to stay fixed on your chosen top card unless you swipe manually.
6. Toggle Widget Suggestions on or off depending on whether you want iOS inserting predictive widgets automatically.
7. Tap the close button or tap outside the editor to save your changes.