What is the panic pad widget?

One kind, one size, one tap

Fold'em ships three widget kinds. The run widget draws how long you have been gambling free, the support widget draws your circle, and the panic pad is the third: a small widget, home screen only, that is a single tap to SOS. It appears in the widget gallery as SOS, described there as one tap to the support screen.

It reads nothing. Where the other two widgets load a snapshot the app writes for them, the pad loads no file, has one timeline entry and never refreshes, so there is nothing on it that can go stale and nothing it can disclose. What it draws is a glass pad with a ring mark inside it, and the ring is the only place the crisis colour appears anywhere in the set.

Two faces, and the difference is who else sees it

The widget's own settings carry a Pad style choice with two values: Mark and word, which draws the ring with SOS lettered under it, and Mark alone, which draws a larger ring and no text at all. The two behave identically. They exist as one widget with a setting rather than as two gallery rows because the only difference between them is how much a person looking over your shoulder can read, and that belongs in the widget's settings rather than in a second listing.

What a tap does

The whole face is the tap target, and the tap opens Fold'em. The app then writes the same small note the block screen's escape writes, reads it once, and deletes it. Because the write and the read now happen inside the app itself, the note cannot be missed and the open cannot fail on account of it.

What happens next follows the same rule as the block screen escape. If your protection is on, the SOS screen is raised. If nothing is blocked, the app opens at its normal home and raises nothing, which is the block screen's own behaviour rather than a second one invented for the widget. The note the pad writes never names a call destination, so the pad can never open the dialer: it means SOS and only SOS.

Why this page has no photograph of it

Every other screen on this site is a real capture of the running app. A widget face is the one thing that cannot be captured honestly: the widget gallery caches its previews across installs, so a picture taken on a simulator is a picture of whatever was cached, not of the build. The diagram above draws the three kinds and their faces instead, and the only honest way to see the real thing is to place one.

What this does not do

The pad does not call anyone and shows no number. It does not unlock an app, end a term, cancel a wait or touch any part of what is blocked. It records no craving on its own: the count of urges ridden out is written by the SOS screen after 60 seconds, not by the tap that opened it. It carries no name, no photograph and no status word, so a person who picks up your phone learns nothing from it beyond that Fold'em is installed, and the mark alone face does not say even that in words. And it is a home screen widget, so it is not on your lock screen and cannot be tapped from there.