Features
Home & lock-screen widgets
Home & lock-screen widgets
Put the light on your home screen. Viewpoint’s widgets keep the day’s golden and blue hour, tonight’s moon and Milky Way, your next shoot, and the shooting conditions a glance away — without opening the app.
What you can add
- Sun & Light. The light where you are. A colour-coded icon shows the phase you’re in right now — blue hour, golden hour, daytime, night — and the widget counts down to the next moment (“Golden hour · Sunrise in 18 min”), rolling forward through the day (blue hour → golden hour → sunrise → daytime → … → sunset) as each phase passes. The medium size adds the sunrise and sunset times and the golden- and blue-hour windows for the day, with your location in the header.
- Tonight. The moon phase and how lit it is, moonrise and moonset, and — when the sky gets dark enough — the window when the Milky Way’s galactic core is up, with how many dark hours you’ll get.
- Conditions. The quality scores Viewpoint computes — Clear Night, Golden Light, Fog, Snow, Storm Light — for the places you watch: each watched spot or area gets tonight’s scores for the conditions you track there, so you can see at a glance where it’s worth heading out. (No watches yet? It falls back to scoring your current location.) Scores grey out when there’s no data for them yet. Tap it to open your conditions in the app.
- Plan & Spots. Your next shoot plan — its spot, date and time, and the focal length you planned — plus a count of your saved spots. Tap it to open that plan; on the medium size, tapping the shoot below it opens that one.
- Snap a spot. A one-tap shortcut: tap the widget to open the camera and capture a spot right where you are — your GPS, the sun, and the weather are stamped automatically. The same Snap a spot action works with Siri, the Shortcuts app, and the Action button, so you can capture by voice or a single press without finding the app first.
- AR Scout. A glance at tonight’s golden and blue hour, and a one-tap way to open the AR camera — point your phone at the sky and see where the sun, moon and Milky Way will be. (The AR camera is part of the subscription; the light times on the tile are free.)
- Quick Tools. A medium tile of one-tap shortcuts — Snap a spot, AR Scout, Calculators, and Plans — so your most-used tools are a single tap from the home screen.
Most come in small and medium sizes (Snap a spot is a small one-tap tile). (Where a widget doesn’t have enough to fill a large tile, we leave large out rather than ship a half-empty one — the medium says it all.) There are lock-screen versions too: a moon-phase circle, a strip showing the current light phase and the next event, and an inline countdown you can sit next to the clock.
What’s free and what needs a subscription
- Free to add (no subscription): the Sun & Light, Tonight (moon & Milky Way), Plan & Spots, and Snap a spot widgets. The astronomy is computed on your device and your spots and plans are your own, so these render even before you subscribe — a glance at what Viewpoint does.
- Needs the Online plan: the Conditions widget, which shows live, server-scored conditions. Without it the widget shows a tidy locked panel inviting you to subscribe instead of the live scores.
Times match where you are
Widgets use your current location and its local time, so the sun, moon, and Milky Way times are always right for where you are.
Works offline — and tells you how fresh it is
The sun, moon, and Milky Way widgets are pure on-device astronomy: they keep working with no connection. The Conditions widget shows the last scores Viewpoint downloaded, labelled with the time they were taken (“as of 21:34”), since a fresh forecast needs a connection. Widgets refresh in the background and update the next time you open the app, so a widget is never more out of date than the last time Viewpoint ran.
In your language
Widgets are shown in the same languages as the rest of Viewpoint.