Recently, in the Apple App Store rankings, a widget app called colorful Widgets has surged to the top of the chart, surpassing AI assistant Doubao from Douyin, Kuake from Alibaba, and national-level apps like Douyin and WeChat.

A wallpaper app has shot to the top of Apple's free app chart. What did this app do right?

We know that since the PC era and now in the mobile internet era, personalized widgets and wallpapers have become the facade and decoration of these smart devices, reflecting people's personality and attitude towards aesthetic tastes.

As users' expressions of fashion and culture continue to evolve and technologies like AI and design tools improve, more and more consumers are willing to pay for high-quality and personalized products.

Colorful Widgets has shot to the top of the chart, perhaps because this widget product has hit consumers' psychological needs in this era.

Colorful Widgets is a personalized mobile phone desktop theme beautification tool with many innovative widgets. It helps users modify various theme wallpapers and app logos, making users' phones look brand new and personalized.

According to the team, the app has accumulated tens of millions of users and millions of daily active users on both iOS and Android.

There are many desktop tool products in China. Why did this software break through and top the chart?

Behind this is first the product team's sense of trends, creating barriers in the widget gameplay.

It is understood that the product's founder is a product director of a Nasdaq-listed company and one of the earliest pioneers in the mobile internet industry. He has been deeply involved in the tool industry since around 2010, laying out the overseas market early on and deeply cultivating Android desktop personalization products. From the earliest Android desktops, cameras, lock screens, input methods, and other products, he has always incorporated personalized content into tool products as a philosophy. He has more than 10 years of experience in developing mobile tool products.

Because of this, when iOS Widget functionality was released and iOS opened up such personalized permissions, the team immediately saw this opportunity and replicated its years of experience and accumulation in the tool industry and desktop products to the new platform. It has been three years since Apple added the widget system in iOS 14, but there are not many domestic desktop widget tool products that are well-played.

Due to years of deep cultivation in desktop personalization products, the team saw trends earlier and laid out earlier, creating barriers in widget gameplay. When you open this app, you'll find a lot of lively stuff inside. It provides almost 100+ types of widgets, from battery display, weather information, countdown days, and interactive components to various shake-to-animate animations, multi-functional flexible panels, and anime-style widget templates like toothless battery, smack records, electronic squeezing fun, and tilting rotating cards. It covers various practical and entertainment functions, satisfying the needs of different users, and has many small innovations that integrate iOS system functions.

It can customize the mobile phone desktop, including uploading personal photos, creating your own desktop components and app icons, and one-click installing theme icons. You can also freely adjust the desktop layout to achieve a completely personalized desktop theme.

The innovation of this widget is also reflected in its support for iOS 16 lock screen widgets, providing lock screen quick start and lock screen emoji patterns, enhancing the creativity and fun of unlocking the phone. For example, in the lock screen wallpaper, you can directly add cute and interesting gif emojis to your lock screen, or add music apps to the wallpaper, and tap to enter music playback, greatly enhancing user efficiency.

Integration and innovation with Dynamic Island, dynamically displaying personalized preferences

Due to its early development, Colorful Widgets has many interesting features, typified by its unique Dynamic Island creative animations. In the fall of 2022, the Dynamic Island introduced with the iPhone 14 garnered global attention. It is a standardized system interaction specification system that requires cooperation from app developers. If an app can create more fun innovations based on Dynamic Island, it is often favored and recognized by Apple.

One feature of this product is that it combines Dynamic Island to create many creative animations, with various categories like Animation Island, Charging Island, Creative Tool Island, Wallpaper Island, etc. For example, in Animation Island, there is an animated image of a panda riding a bike through Dynamic Island, and users can customize various contents of Dynamic Island, which is very interesting.

This kind of interesting personalized gadget, similar to special effects, makes the desktop less boring and becomes fun and interesting.

When it comes to widgets, Android initially supported a high degree of customization for widgets, but Apple did not. However, from recent years, especially after Dynamic Island, iOS's development direction shows that Apple has strengthened its support for widgets, allowing users to directly add widgets to the desktop.

Dynamic Island, as an innovation that Apple attaches great importance to, very much looks forward to developers creating various interesting adaptations around Dynamic Island to enhance its playability. The gameplay of Colorful Widgets caters to Apple's demands. Therefore, looking back, its surge to the top of Apple's free app chart itself reflects the platform's support for app developers to create functional innovations around Dynamic Island.

Wallpaper DIY, playing with anime styles

Wallpaper DIY is an important preference of many young people today, and this software has developed its own style in wallpaper DIY. For example, it can DIY various highlights to its wallpapers, such as various beautiful landscapes, ins styles, AI, creativity, illustrations, couples, custom dynamics, and other styles, creating wallpapers that suit your personality preferences.

The fun of DIY lies in being able to set various dynamic, cute, lovely anime images, anime styles, Japanese styles, AI styles, and other styles based on your own needs. Through various materials, DIY creates your own style and characteristics, which is deeply loved by anime and fan circle users and also caters to the preferences of the new generation of young people born after 1995 and 2000.

From comprehensive and rich choices to novel social interaction, maximizing the fun of widgets

Overall, this widget software perfectly adapts to the iOS 17 system, ensuring that users can fully utilize the functions and features of the new system. In addition to diverse widgets and comprehensive, rich wallpaper options, the app also has amazing desktop interaction capabilities.

On the one hand, users can share photos and emojis with other users, similar to the design of Locket Widget. Close friends can send messages to each other's desktops through couple components like small notes, enabling wallpaper desktop social interaction and maximizing fun and interactivity.

Overall, its wallpaper types and widget gameplay and options are very comprehensive, and there is always one that suits you.

Today, as users' pursuit of personalization and aesthetics continues to increase, mobile phone wallpapers, as a way to showcase personal tastes, emotions, attitudes, and values, have great market potential. Huawei, vivo, OPPO, Xiaomi, and other mobile phone brands are also increasing their promotion of paid wallpapers. Colorful Widgets, as a widget product, is also a wallpaper treasure trove, satisfying consumers' demand for high-quality, personalized, massive wallpapers, and even DIY wallpapers.

Insights from topping the App Store free chart

Behind this app's ability to top the App Store free chart is that it stands at a popular trend, while the product team has over 10 years of accumulation in Android desktop beautification (widget beautification, wallpaper beautification, desktop matching), with deep resources and competitiveness. Through product iterations, it continues to move forward quickly around user needs, closely following iOS widget trends to achieve gameplay innovations.

Apple has always imposed many restrictions on desktop beautification, but desktop widgets are an exception. Excellent apps can attract users to download and use through a good-looking and user-friendly widget, which is an important reason why Apple supports the trend of widget innovation.

There are inherent opportunities for application innovation in this. Colorful Widgets has made many adaptations and innovations based on Dynamic Island and iOS lock screen desktops, performing quite well in terms of playability and efficiency.

In addition, the app's insight and foresight into the market needs of young users (anime, otome games) have captured users' continuously iterating needs for widget interaction and innovation, and explored various interesting innovations in wallpaper gameplay.

Product innovation has opportunities at any time, and insight into consumer trends and team execution are the keys.

After the iOS 16 update, iPhone lock screen widgets have been adapted by many third-party apps, becoming a major reason for many iPhone users to update to iOS 16.

Behind this lies a huge consumer demand, and Colorful Widgets has adapted based on iOS updates, playing around with lock screen desktop widgets, combining Dynamic Island innovations, integrating the system to achieve gameplay innovations, and thus gaining Apple's support.

Conclusion:

What kind of innovation can move users? This has always been a question that many manufacturers ponder. Many app developers tend to focus on what competitors are doing and then make some optimizations in imitation, but they fall into the quagmire of homogenization.

The more mature the smartphone stage is, the more consumers are attracted to fun and interesting ideas. The innovation of Colorful Widgets' wallpaper widgets is not technically complex, but it brings a lot of small pleasures to the past wallpaper gameplay.

Colorful Widgets' success tells us that there are always great opportunities for app startups. The key is to understand the direction of consumer demand upgrades, judge and innovate in line with the trends of system platforms. An important practice of Colorful Widgets is to insight into the overall direction of the platform and adapt to Apple's support for desktop widget functional innovation earlier. Based on insights into young people's needs and the market, it has made forward-looking layouts, which is inseparable from the team's long-term accumulation of resources and creating fun functional highlights that exceed user expectations and have a novelty impulse and sticky value. Ultimately, it hits consumers' pain points in the product, which may be a breakthrough path worth learning from for entrepreneurs.