Apple’s iOS widgets are available in three sizes, which we’ll call small, medium, and venti. Kidding! We’ll call the last one large. They take up the space of four apps (square), eight apps (horizontal rectangle), and 16 apps (big square, basically half of your screen), respectively. They use all that extra space to surface handy information. Take the Weather app, probably the most straightforward example of what a widget can do for you. Take the Weather app, probably the most straightforward example of what a widget can do for you. The small iOS Weather widget shows you the current temperature, that day’s forecasted high and low, and a tiny graphic to convey if it’s sunny, cloudy, rainy, and so on. Step up to medium and you get all that plus a snapshot forecast of the next five hours. Going gigante adds a five-day outlook.

THE CONDITIONS ARE not ideal for our landing. A hard wind is blowing over the low hills east of San Francisco, and at just the wrong angle—straight across the runway where we’re set to touch down. But as we ease into our final approach, our two-winged shadow clipping the suburban homes below, the veteran pilot sitting beside me makes a gentle suggestion. “I like to do it hands up. Like a roller coaster,” he says.“It will be very uneventful, almost boring,”

Maxime Gariel, the chief technology officer of Xwing, had assured me shortly before our fully autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing. “That’s what we’re aiming for.” That hadn’t seemed to mean much coming from Gariel, an aerospace engineer whose interest in planes began by jumping out of them for recreation. But “almost boring” is an apt assessment. After all, the last thing anyone wants out of pilot-free air travel is excitement.

Take the Weather app, probably the most straightforward example of what a widget can do for you. The small iOS Weather widget shows you the current temperature, that day’s forecasted high and low, and a tiny graphic to convey if it’s sunny, cloudy, rainy, and so on. Step up to medium and you get all that plus a snapshot forecast of the next five hours. Going gigante adds a five-day outlook. Some apps offer multiple variations of widget. Wikipedia can just as easily show you a “picture of the day.” In the meantime, the humans remain aboard. As we bank serenely over the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, Gariel sits in the back of the plane in front of two screens, acting the role of the ground-based “pilot.”You’ll find yourself back on whatever screen you started from, icons still jiggling merrily. iOS will have displaced your apps to make room for the widget, but just hold down on it and move it around like you would any normal-sized app.