Cozy's Home Screen Widget: What It Actually Does, Size by Size

The short answer

Yes, the app has a Home Screen widget, and it is free — you do not need Premium for it. In the small size it shows a smiling face and the prompt "How are you feeling?", and tapping it opens the add page. In the medium and large sizes it puts five mood levels one tap away, and tapping a level opens the add page with that level already selected. So it is a shortcut into logging rather than logging without opening the app, and the store listing's "log a mood without opening the app" describes the intent, not the shipped behaviour. It supports the small, medium and large Home Screen sizes, is named "Cozy Mood Tracker", and there is no Lock Screen or StandBy version. Download it on the App Store if you want to try it.

Why you are searching for this

You already decided to track your mood. What has not happened yet is a single entry today. The blocker is not the entry itself, which is a face and two taps, but the run-up: finding the app, waiting for it to launch, and finding the add button on the Home tab. Cozy's own App Store submission notes describe the intended daily path as tapping "+" on the Home tab — which means the run-up is the design, not a mistake you are making.

That is why the widget question is really a question about the habit rather than about the feature. A tracker you open when a notification nags you is a tracker you open three times a month. Putting the input on a screen you are already looking at lets the gesture survive the moment you actually want to record something.

What the widget does, size by size

The widget extension ships one widget, "Cozy Mood Tracker", in three sizes:

• Small: a smiling face and the prompt "How are you feeling?". One tap deep-links to cozy://pages/add, the app's add page.
• Medium: the same prompt plus a row of five mood buttons, level 1 through level 5, drawn from the Default pet's asset set at a smaller size.
• Large: the same five buttons laid out in a three-column grid with labels, at a larger size.

Every mood button is a deep link of the form cozy://pages/add?level=<n>. The level arrives at the add page already selected, so what the widget removes is the search: which tab, which face. It does not remove the app launch. The remaining steps are the ones the store listing describes anyway, picking factors and optionally writing a note before saving, and there is no widget-only path that writes an entry.

The honest limits of the widget

• No Lock Screen or StandBy. The shipped widget declares the small, medium and large families only, so it cannot be added to the Lock Screen or to StandBy, which is where a "just log it now" capture would be fastest.
• Hourly timeline. The widget requests a new timeline roughly once an hour and lets iOS decide when it actually lands. The mood levels it offers are fixed, not derived from your data, so a stale refresh does not show you a wrong mood.
• It reads your mood images from the bundled Default pet assets, falling back to system face symbols if an image is missing. A custom mood symbol set is not guaranteed to appear in the widget.
• The pet state and today's mood the store listing describes are not in the shipped widget. The listing says the widget shows your pet state as a small reminder, while the current widget takes input rather than displaying it. Treat that as version-dependent.
• iOS 17 or later. Both the app and the widget declare a 17.0 minimum, so an iPhone XS or newer.

Adding it in thirty seconds

Press and hold an empty spot on your Home Screen, tap Edit, then Add Widget, search for "Cozy Mood Tracker" and pick it. Resize it to medium or large if you want the five levels visible; the small size is fine if you are happy starting from the add page. If you use Face ID, turn on rotation lock or keep the Home Screen on your lock-screen-swipe side so the widget is one swipe away. None of this requires an account, and the widget is part of the free tier, so it is worth setting up before you decide anything about Premium.

How it compares to the obvious alternatives

A Shortcut or Siri can launch the app for you, but it has the same shape: it opens and you still navigate to the add page. What the widget does is skip the navigation and, in the larger sizes, skip choosing the level.

Streak and dashboard widgets in other trackers are read-only. They show a streak count or a chart and ask you to open the app to add to it. This one is an input surface instead: five buttons that put you one tap from an entry with the level chosen.

Nothing at all, which is the honest baseline. The second lever is the companion pet on the Home tab, whose state reflects how consistently you have logged. It is a softer nudge than a streak counter and does the same job, and the Default and Bear themes ship with the app while Premium unlocks more outfits and themes. If the companionship is what keeps you logging, that is the part doing the work.

What Cozy does differently, and what it costs

The pairing is the differentiator: a widget that is the input, next to a companion that reacts to your consistency, next to achievements for tracking streaks. No account is required, entries are stored locally, HealthKit is read-only and only if you turn it on, and optional encrypted iCloud sync is off by default so bringing history to a second device is a decision you make rather than one you inherit.

Premium is $4.99/month or $29.99/year in the US, with a seven-day free trial on the yearly plan for first-time subscribers, or $49.99 once for lifetime access. It unlocks all pet themes and outfits, deep HRV stress insights such as triggers, recovery patterns and advice, and custom mood symbols with advanced factors. The widget itself, the Home-tab companion, and logging stay free. Full details are on the Cozy product page.

The decision

If you have been meaning to log and keep not doing it, the widget is the cheapest possible fix and it costs nothing to try: add it, size it to medium, and let it be the only mood surface you touch. If you already log reliably, it will not change much, because the widget does not write an entry on its own and the pet is not a substitute for reviewing your week and month views. What Cozy does not solve is not wanting to look at the data. Add the widget from the App Store listing, and if the pattern shows up over the next month, the deeper views are waiting behind the same icon.