Quick settings tile

A quick settings tile is a piece of an app that lives outside the app. The operating system owns a panel of controls, pulled down from the top of the screen or swiped in from a corner, and an app may contribute one entry to it: a glyph, a short title, sometimes a value, and a single tap that does the thing. The whole point is that the app is not running and does not have to start. Someone lowering the panel to switch a feature is not visiting the app, they are operating one of its switches from the shell.

The anatomy is unusually strict, and it is most of what there is to learn. The symbol has to read at a very small size against a background the app does not control. The title is a handful of characters and gets truncated without mercy, so it names the feature and never the app. The value is optional and is where most of the craft goes: a tile that says only “on” is worse than one that says “on, until 6pm”, and a tile whose value is stale is worse than one that shows none. Because the system draws the tile, the app supplies content and state rather than layout, which is why these are a component and not a widget.

The names collide badly and it is worth being explicit about it. Android calls them quick settings tiles, and the API is literally a tile service. Apple calls them Controls, which runs straight into the generic sense of the word: every button, slider, and switch in every interface is a control, so “add a control” is ambiguous in a way “add a tile” is not. Apple also groups them with the same building blocks used for widgets and Action button actions, which makes the picture broader but the word no clearer. When precision matters, say quick settings tile or Control Center control, and reserve the bare word control for the general sense.

Against a switch the difference is ownership and reach. A switch is a control inside your app, styled by you, understood in the context of the screen around it. A tile is the same state exposed through someone else’s surface, with no screen around it to give it context, which is why the title has to carry all the meaning on its own. Against an icon button the difference is that a tile is stateful by default: most of them report a condition as well as accepting a tap, and a tile that only fires an action has to work harder to look like it did anything, since the panel usually closes underneath it.