You add Airtable’s widget to your iPhone hoping to see your key figure at a glance. You tap it, and the app opens. Helpful in its own way, but not quite what you pictured. You wanted the number. You got a shortcut into the app instead.
This is a fair thing to be curious about, so let’s look at what’s really going on.
What Airtable’s widget does
Airtable’s own iPhone widget is a doorway. It gives you a fast tap into your data, and when you press it, it takes you into the Airtable app to the right spot. That’s genuinely useful when your next step is to open the app and work.
What it doesn’t do is show the value itself. The widget on your Home Screen doesn’t display “142 orders” or “68% to goal.” For that, you still open the app and go look.
Why that gap makes sense
Airtable does a lot. It runs whole teams and countless kinds of projects, and building deep, glanceable widgets for the Home Screen is one small corner of a very big product. It’s easy to see why it hasn’t been the priority.
That corner is exactly where a small, focused app can go deep. When your only job is to show Airtable numbers well on the Home Screen, you can make that one thing really good.
Show the number instead
Air Widgets takes the value you care about and puts it right on your Home Screen, in the widget itself. You glance, you read the number, and you carry on. No tap, no loading, no digging for the right screen.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- A live count, like orders today or open tickets.
- A running total, like this month’s revenue.
- A progress ring that fills as you near a goal.
- A small chart so you can see the trend at a glance.
The figure updates as your Airtable data changes, so what you see is current. And when you do want to dig in, you can still open Airtable and work the way you always have. The two fit together nicely: Airtable is where you build and edit, and Air Widgets is where you keep an eye on the numbers all day.
Set it up once
Getting started is quick. Connect your Airtable to Air Widgets, pick the number you want to watch, choose how it looks, and drop it on your Home Screen. After that, it just sits there and stays fresh on its own.
Air Widgets is a native iPhone app made for this one job. It works with Airtable and is not affiliated with Airtable. It’s simply the layer that shows the value, so a widget can do more than send you into the app.
Air Widgets is coming soon. Want to see the number instead of the app? Get notified when we launch, and we’ll tell you the moment it’s ready.
