Shortcuts is the exception to that rule, whose original Workflow widget carved its own path that still exists to this day with the Shortcuts widget being able to run shortcuts without ever opening the app. Today, all other apps (besides Shortcuts) do not have any sort of interaction capability besides opening their app to respond to a tap on the widget. Thankfully, that initial ruling was reversed and both PCalc and Workflow ended up with interactive widgets - for a time. This initial disapproval from Apple over interactive widgets expanded to the Workflow app, the original version of Shortcuts - the team didn’t add a Workflow widget originally, because running workflows from the widget would fall short of the rules from Apple.

This extends all the way back to the introduction of Today widgets in iOS 8, where the venerated calculator app PCalc was rejected for making a functional calculator in the widget at a time when Apple wanted you to see what was “happening today” in that screen. Tracing back to their origins as Apple Watch complications, widgets are supposed to be glanceable, update with new information over time, and provide contextually-relevant information.

Shortcut lock macbook