How do I get the Photos widget on my ipad home screen?
QI can get the new Photos widget on my iphone 8’s home screen but not on my ipad Mini’s home screen. My ipad Mini is the fifth generation – the latest model.
The Photos widget does appear on the slide panel that’s to the left of the home screen, so how do I use it? Anne-marie Nicol
AThe short answer is that you can’t (yet) do this on any ipad. Back in 2019 Apple split its mobile operating system into two versions – IOS for iphones and ipados for ipads. They were (and remain) very similar, but we noted at the time that they would begin to diverge. Widgets is one such area.
Though the reasons aren’t entirely obvious, it’s not quite so simple for Apple to implement widgets in the ipad home screen. This is partly because ipads employ an icon grid with more space between the icons, but also because the home-screen icon grid can be rotated through 90 degrees.
This is a feature that’s not possible on most iphones. Some of the older iphone Plus models, with their larger screens, do allow home-screen rotation, but this won’t work if the iphone’s home screen has widgets.
The upshot is that, as things stand, widgets on rotatable home screens would break the horizontal layout grid, so Apple doesn’t allow widgets on ipads (or large-screen iphones).
We’re sure the company will eventually figure a way to do this without breaking the horizontal layout – perhaps by squashing the icon grid, or disabling rotation when widgets are present – but until then, there’s no fix.