With iOS 18, Apple has made the Control Center and even your Lock Screen much more customizable with support for widgets from third-party apps. Below, I’ll share some great apps you can use to make the most of the redesigned Control Center.
1 Waterllama
Everyone knows how important it is to stay hydrated daily. Waterllama makes tracking your daily water intake fun and easy. The full-featured app allows you to track water from anything you drink, including more than 40 popular beverages.
The app provides smart reminders throughout the day to ensure you remember to hydrate. It customizes how much water you need depending on activity level, body weight, climate, and gender.
With the app’s Control Center widget, you can open up the app or quickly add a custom amount of water or other beverage to your daily total. And both widgets are animated as well to make hydrating a bit more enjoyable.
Download:Waterllama (Free, subscription available)
2 Halide Mark II
If you’re looking for a more powerful take on Apple’s Camera app, Halide Mark II should be at the top of your list. The app features an easy-to-use gesture interface that you can use with one hand and other great tools like manual full manual exposure controls including shutter speed, ISO, and white balance.
With the app’s Process Zero mode, you can skip Apple’s image processing to get the perfect image without that highly processed look.
While the app has a Control Center widget to quickly launch the app, it’s also a perfect replacement for Apple’s Camera app on your customizable iOS 18 Lock Screen. Even though the app is free to download, a subscription is required to use it.
Download:Halide Mark II (Subscription required, free trial available)
3 Todoist
Todoist can help you keep track of pretty much any task imaginable. Thanks to natural language technology, it’s easy to add tasks that happen once or are recurring. For more complex tasks, you can create a project that can be viewed as a list, board, or calendar to manage your time and tasks.
Using the Control Center widgets, you can quickly add a task to the app or open the app in a specific view, like the tasks you need to accomplish today at work or even in your personal life.
Download:Todoist (Free, subscription available)
4 LookUp Dictionary
Along with an extensive dictionary, this app offers a number of great vocabulary tools for anyone who wants to improve their language skills. The app helps make language come to life with a Word of the Day feature that sports great illustrations. Tap the card to find out more about the word, such as origins and synods.
You’ll find a number of actions you can add to the Control Center with the app’s widgets. You can quickly open up the app to search for a word via text, scan a word with the camera to see its definition, or start the app’s Reading Mode, which will provide a Live Activity to help you quickly find a word’s meaning from the Dynamic Island or Lock Screen.
Download:LookUp Dictionary (Free, subscription available)
5 Spark
Spark makes managing your email deluge just a bit easier. One of the app’s best features is that it will automatically sort the most important messages at the top of your inbox. Newsletters and notifications will automatically be grouped below so you can tackle those later.
You can use the app with multiple email accounts at the same time. Other nice features include built-in AI to help write emails for you and functionality to collaborate with team members. It’s also a great way to optimize your email productivity on a Mac.
The app offers four widgets you can add to the Control Center. You can quickly launch the app to write an email, search, go directly to attachments, or view your calendar.
Download:Spark (Free, subscription available)
6 Lumy
Whether you’re looking to capture the perfect image with great light or find an ideal time for another outdoor activity, Lumy can be handy. The app can tell you information about major solar events like sunrise, sunset, golden hour, and more at your location. After the sun goes down, the app will also tell you everything you need to know about the moon and its cycles.
The app even integrates with mood logging in the Health app and can suggest time outside to help your mood.
Besides quickly opening the app from the Control Center widget, you can also choose to start a Live Activity timer for a specific event like sunset or golden hour or receive a notification for the event.
Download:Lumy ($6.99)
7 Crouton
Crouton makes cooking meals easier. The app is both a recipe organizer and a meal planner. Before the start of the week, you can plan your week with recipes stored in the app.
Crouton can even create a plan automatically. When it’s time to cook, the unique step-by-step mode allows you to focus on a single step at a time with both the ingredients and quantities. You can even move between steps in hands-free mode so your messy hands don’t have to touch the screen.
The app’s Control Center widget provides one-touch access to the app’s recipe import feature. Thanks to AI, you can import a recipe with a single photo instead of a manual entry. It also supports both plain text and images.
Download:Crouton (Free, subscription available)
8 Plinky
Plinky helps you save any link you can find, whether it’s a video, article, social media post, or something else. With the app’s extension, you can save links with a single tap in Safari or other popular browsers. In the app, you can use folders and tags to organize your saved links on common themes like news or entertainment.
With the Control Center widgets, you can quickly launch one of the app’s actions, like saving a copied link or selecting a tag or folder in the app to access.
Download:Plinky (Free, subscription available)
9 Peak
Peak makes it easy to better understand your fitness goals. With the app, you can create a custom dashboard with the exact metrics you want to see, like steps, workouts, activity rings, and more. Each metric can also show blocks like charts, goals, totals, and trends for an even better understanding.
If you don’t want to open the app every time you want to view relevant information, you can rely on the app’s Home Screen or Lock Screen widgets. You can use the app’s Control Center widgets to quickly view your goals or pinned blocks, see progress for any metric, and log important information like weight or BMI.
Download:Peak (Free, subscription available)
Adding widgets to your Control Center or Lock Screen is a great way to have one-touch access to apps you frequently use. I’m glad that Apple finally opened the Control Center to third-party apps in iOS. But that’s just one of the many great features iOS 18 offers.
