The full answer
Between them they offer ten faces, seven on the Home Screen and three on the Lock Screen. Every number on every face comes from the app's own count, read out of a file the app writes, so a widget never works one out for itself. The three Lock Screen faces deliberately never name the category, because a Lock Screen can be read without unlocking the phone.
Four kinds, ten faces
In the widget gallery Fold’em offers four rows.
- Gambling free is your own count, and it has the most faces: small, medium and large on the Home Screen, and all three Lock Screen accessories.
- Circle is one medium face carrying people from your circle, with a key mark on the one who holds your key.
- SOS is one small face, the pad.
- Standing with is for the people you support, in a medium face and a large one.
Six Gambling free faces, one Circle face, one pad and two Standing with faces is the ten.
No Gambling free face says gambling. The three Home Screen faces and the rectangular Lock Screen face carry the title Your Time, the other two Lock Screen faces show only the number and its unit, and only the widget gallery names the kind. That matters most on the Lock Screen, which can be read without unlocking the phone. The unit moves with the count, from minutes up to years. If you set a goal, the Home Screen faces carry a small flag with the days left to it, and a goal you reached reads zero.
Where the numbers come from
The app writes a small file with the moment your run started and the people a face needs, and the widget reads it. Nothing is computed inside the widget, which is what stops a Home Screen and the app disagreeing about the same day.
A run that has only just started shows its minutes rather than a row of zeros, and a phone with no run recorded says so instead of counting. When the file cannot be read, a face asks you to open Fold’em for updates rather than showing a number it cannot stand behind. The Standing with faces also do this once their copy is too old.
iOS redraws a widget on a schedule rather than continuously, so a face can sit a few minutes behind the app. The app's own screen is the one to check a number against.
Adding one, and choosing its face
-
Add it the way you add any widget
Fold’em writes no instructions of its own for this, because Apple maintains them. In the app, Settings, then Help, carries a Widget guide row, and it opens Apple's own page on adding and editing widgets.
-
Choose what the pad shows
The SOS pad draws its mark on its own, or the mark with the word SOS under it. Tapping it opens the app at SOS, whatever else is going on.
-
Reach someone from the Circle face
A tap on a person opens their call and message row inside the widget, and either of those opens the app.
What this does not do
No face says whether your own block is holding. That is on purpose: the moments that refresh a widget do not include Screen Time being switched off or site blocking dropping, so a status word about your own protection would go stale on exactly the faults it claimed to report. The Lock tab in the app is where your protection is reported. No widget can release, pause, shorten or extend anything, and removing one changes nothing about your block. And a widget shows nothing until the app has run at least once on this phone, because every number on it comes out of a file the app writes.
Write to us and a person reads it. We answer within two working days, and we would rather hear the question twice than not at all.