How to Use App Groups for iOS Widget Development

Sharing data between a main app and its widget(s) is a much more complicated process than you’d expect. That’s because iOS apps are separate and, in some ways, isolated from their widgets. The biggest drawback this causes is that widgets do not automatically have access to the same data that their main app does 🤔

This forces the developer to do 1 of 2 things:

1️⃣ Fetching data from the main app and then, assuming the widget needs access to this same data, making an independent API call from the widget itself

2️⃣ After data is fetched by the main app, it must get saved to a central location that both the main app and the widget can access, such as an app group

Once you get everything connected with an app group, there are a few different ways to perform CRUD operations in an app group, and which one you use depends on your use case:

1️⃣ UserDefaults

2️⃣ FileManager (what i use in this video)

3️⃣ Core Data

These are the only ways that I know of, but if you know of others then drop them in the comments so i can add them here!

Once your app’s data is saved to the app group shared by both the app extension and the main app, you’re off to the races! 🐎

Got any questions? Drop them in the comments!

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