Magnets uses iOS 14 widgets to put your photos on someone else's iPhone

News
By Oliver Haslam
published

Magnets App Store Screenshots
Magnets App Store Screenshots (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Magnets lets you put a photo on your Home screen.
  • But you can put that photo on someone else's Home screen, too.
  • They can put their own photo on your Home screen as well.

We've been covering all kinds of widgets in recent days but I haven't come across anything that does what Magnets does before. And I still haven't figured out how it works. But work, it does. With Magnets installed you can create a shared widget that lives on your Home screen as well as that of others. And you can all choose images that fill it.

It's like a magnet on a fridge, holding up a school photo if you will. And boy is it cool.

Magnets let's you create collaborative Widgets that can be shared with and updated by your friends. Think of them like fridge magnets or sticky notes. A place where your friends can leave messages for you.The Widget will update on your and your friends Homescreen when someone updates a Magnet with a new photo.

And that's all there is to it. You can only share photos right now, but I can't see any reason why developer Silvan Daehm couldn't add support for text files and whatnot. There you go Silvan – you can have that one for free!

If this sounds good to you – and it should – you can download Magnets from the App Store now. It won't cost you a penny.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.