I wanted to know what people get when they search to do list app with widget, so I started with autocomplete. The exact phrase came back from five different seed queries: typing “to do list app with” completes to it directly, “best to do list app with” completes to “best to do list app with widget,” and “home screen widget to do” and “to do app with home screen” both route back to the same core phrase in a slightly longer form. That is enough repetition across independent starting points to treat it as a real, recurring search, not a one-off.
I then opened five apps that match the search: Stuff (recommended as the best Android option by a review site, since it has no direct listing I could search by name alone), Task.do, To Do List Widget, TodoWidget, and Todoty. Four of the five are iPhone only. The fifth, Stuff, is the lone Android app in the set, which matters here since the app I built was Android only at the time, and its widget still is.
A to do list app with widget is, in every one of these five, a door to a plain checklist
Search for a to do list app with widget and every listing frames the widget the same way: a way to see your pending tasks, or check them off, without opening the app. Stuff organizes tasks into Today, Tomorrow, Soon, and Someday, and you tap a dot to mark one done. Task.do’s widget shows the list so you can glance at what is pending. TodoWidget and To Do List Widget both let you edit or complete a task from the home screen directly, no app launch required. Todoty’s pitch is nearly identical: check off tasks and view top priorities from the widget.
Two of the five, TodoWidget and Stuff, explicitly support marking a task complete from the widget itself without opening the app. The other three describe the widget as read-and-glance, with editing or completion happening once you tap through. Either way, the feature being sold is the same: fewer taps to see or clear a task.
None of them say what happens after you check the box
I read every listing looking for what happens once a task is marked done, and found nothing. No streak counter. No growth visual. No photo or note attached to the finished task, on the widget or in the app behind it. The word “streak” does not appear in any of the five listings I opened, which was itself a small surprise, since streak counters are common enough in habit-adjacent apps that their complete absence here says something: these five are built as task managers, not habit tools, and a finished task is just a task that stops showing up.
That is a reasonable thing for a to-do widget to be. Most people searching this phrase want convenience, not motivation, and a plain checklist you can clear from the home screen delivers exactly that. But it also means the search results for to do list app with widget stop at the door. Nobody in this set describes the room behind it.
The widget is a door, and the room behind it is where apps actually differ
A home screen widget can only show so much: a few lines of text, maybe a tap target. Whatever makes an app distinct from the other four in this list has to live past that door, inside the app, after you have already tapped through or checked something off. None of the five listings I read made any claim about that room. They stop at “see your list, check a box.”
DreamStore’s door looks similar. The room behind it does not
I built DreamStore, so I will say that plainly before describing it.
The widget itself is nothing unusual: per its own Play Store listing, it is “a home screen widget for today’s list,” the same convenience pitch as the five apps above. Where it differs is what is behind that door once you tap through.
DreamStore does not count streaks. Missing a day does not reset anything, and nothing you have already done gets taken away. A small planet at the center of the main screen grows with every todo or routine you complete, and growth stages never move backward. I wrote about why I dropped streaks and what I built in their place in an earlier post.
When you finish a todo, you can attach a photo or video of what you made, where you went, or how a workout felt, directly to that todo. A short daily reflection and a weekly look-back sit alongside it. None of the five widget-focused apps I read mentioned anything like this, which is a difference in what is behind the door, not in the door itself. I wrote more about that specific gap, checking the five apps that match a related search, in an earlier post about to-do apps with photos.
What is not here matters too, so I will list it plainly.
- The widget itself does not show the planet or a growth visual. It shows today’s list, same as the apps above.
- No streaks, no penalty for a missed day, and no comparison with other people’s numbers.
- The widget is Android only. The iPhone version, released on October 23, 2026, has no widget yet, and when I ran this search there was no iPhone version at all, which is also why it could not have appeared in a result set where four of five matches were iPhone apps.
- Free to use, supported by ads. An optional Pro subscription removes ads and adds more planet decoration slots, a full year of stats, extra widget colors, and higher video and AI limits.
- I have not measured whether the planet, the lack of streaks, or the photo diary changes how long someone keeps using a to-do widget compared to a plain checklist. I only know why I built it this way: the checklist apps I had used myself stopped mattering to me the moment a task was checked off, and I wanted the after to matter as much as the before.
What I checked, and what I did not
As of October 2026, I opened five listings matching the search to do list app with widget: a review of Stuff on en.androidayuda.com (I could not find a direct Play Store page through the searches I ran), and the App Store listings for Task.do, To Do List Widget, TodoWidget, and Todoty (reached through an aggregator listing, since I could not find its own direct App Store page in the results). The full notes, including the autocomplete seeds I used and what each listing said, are saved separately for this search. I read DreamStore’s own Play Store listing the same day.
I did not install or test any of the five apps myself, only their public descriptions, so a feature that exists in an app but is missing from its store listing would not show up in what I wrote here. I have not found research comparing a plain checklist widget to one backed by a no-streak, photo-attached todo system on which one people keep using longer. This post describes what the current search results show, not which approach works better.