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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Unrelatedly, I'm still trying to figure out why Apple requires me to unlock my phone to look at the weather. Is there some concern that someone could pick up my phone and learn what city it is in?

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You can use the weather widget on the lock screen, and as long as you have lock screen content when locked enabled, you can see the current area's weather just fine. Or do you want the whole app experience?

I'm a little too lazy to experiment, but it wouldn't surprise me if that widget didn't function normally until the phone is unlocked.

I just tried it. It works fine.

The software can read from the phone without unlocking it?

After the first unlock after a reboot yes, except for those items with very high security (usually just keychain items) that require an unlock for every access. Lock screen items can be locked every time you lock the phone, or set to allow access while locked (after first unlock). Unfortunately this is an all or nothing setting, unless the widget specifically uses the redaction views to hide content.

Oddly, I find the weather widget refreshes much more often than the app. I'll tap on the widget, which is up to date, which launches the weather app, which could be from yesterday, and have to wait while it refreshes. Apparently the app doesn't implement any background refresh at all, which is really weird.

So—the widget doesn't function normally until the phone is unlocked?

I don't want to flex but that seems worth acknowledging from every perspective

Until the first unlock after a reboot, no, like I said. Given how rarely iOS devices are rebooted it's not an issue.

The lock screen widgets don't tell you much more than what you can get from looking outside. It's not very helpful to know that it's currently overcast and raining, but it would be a lot more helpful if I could know when the rain is supposed to stop or what the week's forecast is and so on.

You want to be able to launch apps without unlocking your phone? Slippery slope.

If the app doesn't have any sensitive information, then yes. We already do this with home screen widgets today, so clearly there's no real barrier.

Apps can have vulnerabilities (intentional or not). It's a contrived example, but maybe some weather app has a custom icon feature, which means you can then browse photos by opening it on the lock screen and going to that setting.

Widgets can't have vulnerabilities?

They can, but scope and features increase surface area: their limited functionality intrinsically limits that.

Widgets are just apps with limited scope and surface area. There’s no reason they can’t apply this to the weather app which already has (or should have) a limited scope.

Camera app does it.

Nope; the lockscreen camera is actually an entirely different app, or not-quite-app thing. (Note what happens when you open the camera roll in the lockscreen camera.)

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