Instant Note’s widgets open the app. Tap the Lock Screen widget, the text field is already there, you type and save. That is three taps and a few seconds, and for most notes it is right. For some notes the text never changes. “Coffee”. “Headache”. “Called mum”. For those, the tap on the widget should be the whole note.
The version I am considering adds two kinds of buttons. A tag button: tap “Coffee” on the widget and a row tagged Coffee with the current time lands in your database, no app opened. A checkbox button: tap it and a checkbox property on a page you chose flips to done, for the habit or the daily task you keep in Notion.
Tag widgets on the Home Screen already exist in Instant Note Pro. They still open the app. This page is about skipping that step. The iPhone widget guide and the Android widget guide show what is there today.
How it would work
- iOS 17 and later let a widget button run an App Intent without opening the app. The intent would call the Notion API directly: create a page for a tag button, update one checkbox property for a checkbox button.
- You would set each button up in the widget’s settings: which database, which tag, or which page and property. Apple recommends keeping widget configuration to one or two choices, and I would keep it to that.
- On Android the same would use Jetpack Glance widgets with actions. Lock Screen widgets on Android 16 are available on Pixel phones; Samsung has not confirmed them, so there the widget would sit on the Home Screen.
- No signal when you tap: the action joins the offline queue and the widget marks it as pending, so you know it goes out later.
- The widget cannot watch Notion for changes. Notion has no push for third-party apps, and the system caps how often a widget may refresh, so a checkbox you tick inside Notion may show as unticked on the widget for a while.
Is this built?
No. It is on the list of things I might build next, and the order depends on what people ask for. If you want this one, the button below is how you say so.