In Widgetsmith 8.2 we added the ability to give your widgets a ‘clear’ background. This isn’t actually clear (since iOS doesn’t allow that without private API use), but instead just crops part of your home screen wallpaper and uses that as the background.
In order for that to work I need to know precisely where each and every widget is on each and every iPhone model. This involved a massive process of screenshotting and a custom app for doing pixel precise analysis. There are 31 iPhone models which support iOS 26 (which I required for this update), so for each of these I needed to collect nine screenshots.
That all went well, but then I was faced with a slight dilemma about how/if I should support Display Zoom. This is a feature which increases the effective size of your iPhone’s controls by rendering your iPhone’s screen at a lower resolution and then enlarging it to fill the actual screen.
Since Display Zoom creates a new virtual resolution for the iPhone I would need to duplicate all the work I did to support the regular widget positions for each iPhone. This effort is made doubly tricky because the iOS simulator doesn’t properly render Display Zoom so I’d have to rely on screenshots from devices to which I have physical access.
To better inform this decision I went looking for statistics about the usage of Display Zoom, but couldn’t really find anything. So in a recent update to Widgetsmith I built in analytics code which reported Display Zoom usage.
What I found was that overall usage of Display Zoom was at 1.9%, which was lower than I would have guessed. For Widgetsmith I see 18% of users with their Text Size set to something larger than the default size, so I’d have guessed the number would have been much higher than 1.9%.
But that helps me to feel better about not supporting Display Zoom for this feature. That is simply not enough users for it to be viable to sustain the effort supporting it would require.
Here is a breakdown of the Display Zoom adoption by iPhone model family. It seems to skew heavily towards the smallest and largest iPhones.
| Category | Userbase | Display Zoom |
|---|---|---|
| SE | 0.5% | 4.90% |
| Mini | 1.2% | 4.60% |
| Air | 0.2% | 3.80% |
| Plus | 5.0% | 3.20% |
| Pro Max | 20.3% | 2.70% |
| Regular | 50.9% | 1.80% |
| e | 1.0% | 1.80% |
| Pro | 10.8% | 0.90% |
| Overall | 1.90% |