A widget that is the wrong size can be fixed where it sits. Touch and hold it on the Home Screen, choose a different widget size from the menu that appears, and the widget changes in place. No removing it, no hunting through the widget gallery to add it again.
The same menu turns a widget back into an ordinary app icon, and the same gesture on an icon turns it into a widget. Apple sets out the resizing on its Home Screen customization page for iOS 27 and the icon-to-widget half on its widgets page.
Resize a widget in place
- Go to the Home Screen.
- “Touch and hold the app icon or widget on your Home Screen.”
- “Choose a widget size.”
The sizes on offer depend on the app, and Apple says so plainly: “Not all apps offer every widget size. Some apps provide only small and medium widgets, while others offer sizes up to extra large.” If the size you want is missing from the menu, the developer has not built it.
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Apple does not name every size in between, so the menu itself is the list. A widget that only shows two options has two options.
Turn a widget back into an app icon
Apple’s line is: “To change the widget back to an app icon, touch and hold it, then tap” the App Icon button, which it prints as an icon rather than as words. The iOS 26 guide was plainer about where that sits, calling it the leftmost small icon at the top of the pop-up menu. The iOS 27 page drops the description and keeps the button.
This is the fastest way to reclaim space. A large widget you have stopped reading becomes a single icon in two taps, and the app itself is untouched.
Go the other way, from icon to widget
The reverse works from the same gesture, and this half is not new. Apple’s steps: touch and hold the app icon on your Home Screen, then “to choose the size of the widget, tap one of the icons at the bottom of the pop-up menu”. You get a widget without opening the gallery, and the App Icon button takes you back.
While you are in there, change how icons look
The rest of the page covers appearance, and none of it is new in iOS 27. Touch and hold the Home Screen background until the icons jiggle, tap the Edit button, then choose Customize. From there Apple lists:
- Larger icons: tap the Large App Icon button. Apple notes that “in large size, the names of the apps disappear”.
- Dark: a dark appearance for icons and widgets, with Auto switching to dark at night and light during the day.
- Clear: tap Clear “to make the icons translucent”, then choose Light, Dark or Auto.
- Tinted: sliders for color and saturation, or an eyedropper to pull a color out of your wallpaper, then Light, Dark or Auto.
Those four have been part of the Home Screen since iOS 26. Resizing is the part that earns a new section in the iOS 27 guide: the iOS 26 version of this page has no Resize a widget heading at all.
What it works on
Nothing here has a hardware requirement. Apple states no model or country limits on either page, so any iPhone running iOS 27 can do it, which means iPhone 11 and later plus iPhone SE (2nd generation) and later. The only variable is the app: sizes come from the developer, not from iOS.
If you are tidying the look of your iPhone, iOS 27 also moved Text Size, Bold Text, and Liquid Glass to a new Appearance menu in Settings. Everything else in the September 14 update is in our report on Apple releasing iOS 27.
