Any Text · Widgets

My wife and I recently had our first child and when she heads to sleep with our daughter, I occasionally miss important text message notifications from her. I'll have "announce notifications" on, not silenced and somehow I kept having to constantly look at my phone and manually check for messages. Sometimes the notification on the Home Screen would get pushed down so I would open the messages app just to be safe. Too often I didn't see a timely text message until later than I would have liked. Enter Any Text to the rescue!! I have a Shortcuts Personal Automation that sets an Any Text widget to the last message my wife sent me. Paired with a Lock Screen widget (for normal use) and even better, a Standby widget (for when I'm working or sleeping) I can take a breath and rest assured that the last message my wife sent me will *ALWAYS* be visible on my screen. It's so simple and so friggin effective and useful. The only issue for me was that Shortcuts always wants to display a notification telling you the personal automation has just run. This was so annoying but I found out that you can turn off notifications for the Shortcuts app altogether via a tricky little route through Screen Time - google it if you would like to do the same.

The widgets help organize my Home Screen a whole lot. I’d definitely recommend this app to anyone. My one suggestion is adding custom widget backgrounds. This could be nice for quotes, and, if someone wants a “transparent” widget, they could add a section of their wallpaper to it. Also, but not as necessary, maybe add the ability to edit the widget directly with “Edit Widget”. This I imagine could potentially have the ability to let people have unlimited widgets.

Can we have multiple text widgets BECAUSE I have 2 other lockscreens for work and chill time and I wouldn’t want to have the same text showing up. Also…I’m feeling like…could this possible be shared to family and friends? What I mean is- I don’t know if anyone else has done it but it would be cool if we could write a text and we can have shared with others on their lockscreen. This could be achieved if the app asks the contact to join the group in the app? Anyway, it’s awesome! Thanks so much for all of your apps.