What is the SOS widget?

The full answer

It never shows a day count or anybody's name, and the one line it can add is when your own Lockdown run ends. Its own settings offer two faces, the mark with the word SOS under it or the mark alone, because which of those sits on your home screen is a choice about who else sees it. Tapping it opens Fold’em; it cannot dial and it cannot open anything you blocked.

One kind, one size, one tap

Fold’em ships four widget kinds. Gambling free draws how long you have been gambling free, Circle draws people you can call, Standing with draws the people you support, and SOS is the fourth: a small widget, home screen only, that is a single tap to SOS.

It shows almost nothing, on purpose. It carries no day count, no word about your block and nobody's name. What it draws is a flat black pad with a white life preserver on it. The one line it can add is about you alone: while a Lockdown run holds, the widget can show when the run ends, in a line such as Lockdown · until Mon 06:00, taken from what the app last wrote on this phone. If the app has not seen a scheduled run yet, the widget says nothing about Lockdown rather than guess.

Two faces, and the difference is who else sees it

The widget's own settings carry a Style choice with two values: Mark and word, which draws the ring with SOS lettered under it, and Mark alone, which draws the ring and no word; while a Lockdown run holds, both faces add the line saying when it ends. 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 as usual and raises nothing, which is the block screen's own behaviour rather than a second one invented for the widget. The note the widget writes never names a call destination, so the widget can never open the dialer: it means SOS and only SOS.

What this does not do

The SOS widget does not call anyone and shows no count. It does not open a blocked app, end protection, cancel a wait or touch any part of what is blocked, and it does not start a Lockdown run itself: it opens SOS, where the Lockdown button is. It carries no name, no photograph and no word about your block, so apart from a Lockdown run's end time 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.