Plant Care at a Glance: Widgets, Apple Watch & Live Activities
"What needs water today?" now has a home-screen answer. Leaf Scan arrives on your widgets, your lock screen, and your wrist.
The most common plant-care question isn't about botany. It's "what needs me today?" — and until now, answering it meant finding and opening an app. That's a strange amount of friction for a two-second question.
Today Leaf Scan moves to where your eyes already are: the home screen, the lock screen, and your wrist.
Widgets for the two-second check
Today's Care shows what's due now — plant photos, task icons, nothing else — in small, medium, and large. Tap a plant and you land exactly on its task. The empty state might be our favorite screen in the app: "Everyone's happy today."
Plant of the Day rotates through your own garden with one useful tip per plant, and Growth Glance puts a before/after pair from your growth timeline on your home screen — three months of progress next to your calendar app.
Lock screen widgets distill it further: a leaf and a number. Three to water. Glance, done.
Watering day, as a Live Activity
Watering day in a real plant household is a session, not a task — ten minutes, a watering can, a tour of the windowsills. Start "Water all" and a Live Activity follows along on your lock screen and Dynamic Island, checking plants off as you go. When the last one's done, it takes a quiet bow and disappears.
No more reopening your phone with wet hands to remember which fern was next.
On your wrist, and in your shortcuts
The new Apple Watch app is deliberately tiny: today's tasks, tap to complete (with a satisfying haptic), long-press to snooze. A watch-face complication shows the due count all day. Everything syncs back to your phone, even if it was offline when you finished.
Leaf Scan also speaks Shortcuts and Siri now: "Log watering for the monstera" or "What needs water today?" work from anywhere — including that moment when the watering can is in both hands.
One engineering note worth bragging about: none of these surfaces ever phone home. Widgets, Watch, and Live Activities run entirely on data the app prepares locally — instant to load, kind to your battery, useful on airplane mode.
- Three widget families: Today's Care, Plant of the Day, Growth Glance.
- Live Activity turns watering day into a lock-screen checklist.
- Watch app: complete and snooze tasks with a tap.
- Works offline — every surface runs on local data.
FAQ
Are widgets a premium feature?
No. Widgets, the Watch app, Live Activities, and Siri shortcuts are included for every user, free and premium alike. Platform polish shouldn't be a paywall.
Is Android getting widgets?
Yes — a Today's Care home-screen widget ships with the Android version, currently in beta. Wear OS is on the roadmap after that.
Why doesn't the widget update instantly sometimes?
iOS batches widget refreshes to save battery; updates typically land within a few minutes of completing a task. Opening the app always shows the live state.