I suffered a momentary flood of panic during Apple's WWDC 2023 keynote this past week when the iOS 17 preview came and went with no mention of the rumored active widgets feature. The panic only compounded when the iPadOS 17 demo followed, and active widgets took a front-and-center role in the new features coming to Apple's tablets.
"What gives?" my brain sputtered. "Don't tell me that Apple's rolling this feature out to the iPad while skipping iPhones entirely." It also didn't help that iPadOS 17's introduction of lock screen widgets looks very slick, taking advantage of the extra screen space on the iPad.
