Your home screen says something about you. That’s why widget apps keep blowing up — people want their phone to actually look like theirs. Two apps tackling this from wildly different angles: 24QW and Color Widgets. One treats widgets like collectibles. The other gives you a template editor. Let’s break down what that actually means.

What Each App Does

Color Widgets has been around since 2020. It’s a straightforward customization tool — pick a widget style, tweak the colors, swap in a photo, slap it on your home screen. You’ll find clocks, calendars, photo frames, battery indicators, weather readouts. The usual suspects. There’s a built-in editor, themed icon packs, and wallpapers to tie everything together. It’s functional and it works.

24QW doesn’t really do any of that. There’s no clock widget. No weather. No calendar. Instead, you’re pulling collectible design pieces out of a blindbox — think gacha mechanics meets home screen art. Every widget is a standalone visual object, designed to look good and nothing else. It’s closer to collecting designer toys than it is to setting up a productivity dashboard.

Design Philosophy

Here’s where the gap gets interesting.

Color Widgets is built around utility. You’re customizing information displays. Yeah, you can make them pretty — pick an anime theme, go neon, whatever — but the core of it is still “here’s your clock, here’s your calendar, here’s your battery level.” The design serves the data.

24QW flips that entirely. There’s no data. The widget is the design. It sits on your home screen because it looks cool, not because it tells you anything. If Color Widgets is decorating a tool, 24QW is just… decorating. And honestly, that’s a more honest approach to what most people are doing with aesthetic widgets anyway. Nobody’s adding a pastel clock widget because they desperately need to know the time.

The Collectibles Angle

This is 24QW’s whole thing, and it doesn’t have a real competitor here. The blindbox mechanic means you don’t just browse a catalog and pick what you want. You pull, you discover, you get surprised. Some pieces are common. Some aren’t. That scarcity creates actual value — it turns widgets into something you have rather than something you set.

Color Widgets doesn’t play in this space at all. Everything’s available (minus what’s locked behind the subscription). There’s no rarity, no discovery loop, no reason to come back and pull again. You find what you want, you set it, you’re done.

For people who grew up on trading cards, blind bags, and gacha games, 24QW’s model just clicks in a way that a template picker never will.

Pricing and Access

Color Widgets runs on a freemium model with a Pro subscription — $4.99/month or $19.99/year after a 3-day trial. Free users deal with ads and a coin system to unlock certain widgets and icon packs. It’s a pretty standard setup, though some users find the ad frequency annoying.

24QW ties its model to the blindbox pulls themselves. You’re not paying for an ad-free experience or unlocking a template library — you’re paying for the thrill of the pull and the pieces you collect. It’s a different kind of value exchange, one that feels more like buying a pack of cards than subscribing to software.

What’s Coming

Color Widgets keeps iterating on what it already does — new themes, icon packs, editor improvements. Its recent redesign and support for iOS 26’s tinted home screen modes show it’s staying current. But the core loop hasn’t really changed in five years.

24QW has a broader roadmap. Trading between users is on the horizon, which would make the collectible aspect way more real. Wallpapers, custom icons, and accessories are planned too — basically building out a whole aesthetic ecosystem around the collectible model. If they pull it off, it’s not just a widget app anymore. It’s a platform.

Who Should Use What

If you want a nice-looking clock on your home screen and themed icons to match, Color Widgets handles that well. It’s proven, it’s polished, and it does exactly what you’d expect.

If you don’t care about displaying information and you’re more drawn to the idea of collecting unique design pieces — something with personality, scarcity, and a bit of surprise — 24QW is doing something nobody else is. It won’t replace your weather widget. It’s not trying to.

They’re both “aesthetic widget apps” on paper. In practice, they’re barely in the same category.