How to Add, Remove, & Rearrange Widgets in Notification Center of iOS

Notification Center on the iPhone and iPad has long included items like Stocks, Reminders, Calendar, a Today summary, and a Tomorrow summary, and now new versions of iOS allow for third party widgets to be added as well. But since not every widget and notification panel applies to everyone, you may want to adjust what appears in your Notifications panel and remove what you don’t use. Perhaps you just want to rearrange the items, so that Sports scores appear above Stocks or so that your Calendar is on top of everything else. This level of customization is possible in iOS 8 and newer, and it’s really easy to do.

For the walkthrough here we’ll use mostly default widgets and apps since they appear on everyones iPhones, but two other apps with widgets are also shown for demonstration purposes; Yahoo Sportacular and ESPN SportsCenter, both of which can be used to display game schedules and scores.

Rearranging Widgets & Items in Notification Center for iOS

Just want to swap the placement of things in your iOS Notifications panel? Easy:

1. Unlock the iPhone (or iPad / iPod touch) and flip down Notification Center as usual – you can’t edit Notifications panel from the locked screen
2. Tap on the “Today” tab and scroll all the way to the bottom of Notifications to choose “Edit”
3. Grab the Handlebars alongside the item you want to move and either drag it up or down to the location where you want it to appear in the Notification window
4. When finished, tap on “Done” to see the changes

Changing the position of things is great, but for some users they may want to hide items from the Notification Center that they don’t have an interest in seeing or using. That’s just as easy.

Adding & Removing Widgets and Items from iOS Notification Center

Don’t care to see Reminders or Stocks in your Notifications screen? You can add or remove anything:

1. If you haven’t already, unlock the iOS device swipe down to bring about Notifications panel
2. Select the “Today” tab and choose “Edit” at the bottom of the list
• Delete Widgets from Notifications: Tap the red (-) minus buttons alongside items to remove them from the Notification panel
• Add Widgets to Notifications: Tap the green (+) plus button to add a widget to Notification Center
3. Choose the “Done” button in the upper corner to set the changes in place

Any adjustments made to Notifications Center here will be visible when accessed from either the lock screen or elsewhere in iOS.

The ability to customize Notifications like this is much appreciated and a great little addition to iOS 8, and the Widgets feature is also really handy too.

It’s likely that more and more apps will utilize widgets, so as you download more apps on your iPhone and iPad don’t be surprised if the Notifications screen gets a little cluttered and you find yourself heading back into the Edit screen to add and remove things as needed.