1.6.0
3 September 2026
The biggest release Smile has had. Widgets that show weather and your calendar, a paid tier so the app can keep being made, every launch control working on every kind of shortcut, and the whole thing translated into 47 languages.
New
- Eight new widget types: weather, a weather forecast, clock and weather together, an agenda, a month calendar, a countdown, a progress bar for the day or year, and tonight’s moon phase.
- Smile Premium. The launcher, the clock, all ten widgets and every customisation option stay free forever; Premium adds the live widgets above and hides the recommendation cards.
- A gallery of ready-made styles. Around seven hundred one-tap looks across the new widget types, and you can still change anything afterwards.
- Every part of an information widget can now be styled on its own: its own font, size, weight, colour and alignment, and you can reorder the parts.
- Any information widget can be given one app or shortcut to open when you tap it.
- Randomise app positions, per widget. The list reshuffles after every launch so you have to read it instead of tapping from memory.
- On iOS 27, setting up seamless launching is one step instead of ten, because the automation now ships inside the shortcut. Smile also appears in the new full-page widget size.
- Transparent backgrounds work on every widget type, and each widget can use its own wallpaper screenshot.
- Daily limits, breathers and confirmation now work on shortcut-based apps too, not just the simple ones.
- Smile speaks 47 languages, which is every language Apple offers. Spanish, French and Portuguese are split by region, so a phone set to Mexico no longer gets Spain’s Spanish.
Better
- Adding an app was rebuilt around one plain question: is this an app Smile already knows, or do you need a shortcut? "Smooth mode" is now called Advanced, and the mode picker on every single shortcut is gone.
- Unconfigured widgets now show you what they could be, with a real preview of each type rather than a list of names.
- Weather comes from Apple Weather instead of the previous provider, which kept failing. When it does fail it now says so instead of showing nothing.
- Widget text and spacing now scale properly with widget size, so small widgets stop overflowing and large ones stop looking empty. This took four rounds of going through every widget on a small phone.
- Transparent background setup measures your actual screen instead of guessing your phone model, and can find the widget position for you.
- Moving a shortcut to another widget tells you which widgets can accept it and why the others cannot.
Fixed
- Leaving Smile to go and set up a shortcut, then coming back, no longer dumps you at the start. This was the most reported problem with the app, and it was really iOS shutting Smile down in the background. asked for
- Moving a shortcut between widgets could silently delete it. It saved twice at once and the second save overwrote the first.
- A stray space at the end of a shortcut name stopped it launching, and the space was invisible. Names are trimmed now, including ones already saved.
- The app could get stuck on a permanently black screen on iOS 27. Every launch path now has a watchdog that reveals the app if the launch stalls.
- Ten languages shipped and then could not be selected, because the language picker used a hand-maintained list that had not been updated. All of that translation work was sitting there unreachable.
- Semi-transparent colours were being read as fully opaque, which made every progress bar look completely full.
- Granting location access no longer closes the weather setup and makes you start again.
- Some edits to a widget’s appearance updated the preview but were never actually saved.
Taken out again
- Widgets 5 to 10 were briefly made Premium, then unlocked again. All ten are free.
- Transparent backgrounds were briefly made Premium, then unlocked again. They are free.
- A tap-to-tick daily reminder widget was built and then removed. iOS kept refusing to handle the tap inside the widget and opening the app instead, which defeated the point. Widgets set to it fall back to being launchers and keep their styling.
- Support for the system’s clear and tinted home screen modes was added, then reverted. iOS repainted the widget and threw away the colours you had chosen.