IOS 27 Lets You Hide Now Playing, But Can’t Bring It Back

Apple is giving users a way to dismiss the Now Playing widget from the Lock Screen in iOS 27, but the implementation raises an obvious question the feature itself doesn’t yet answer: how do you get it back?

The mechanic is simple. A leftward swipe on the playback controls reveals a Clear button that slides in from the right. Dismissing the widget also clears the smaller Now Playing indicator from the Dynamic Island, so both surfaces go quiet at once.

The gap in the experience is that there’s no deliberate way to restore the widget on demand. The current workarounds are accidental rather than designed: pause playback, wait a few minutes and resume, or switch between media types (a podcast to a video, for instance) which re-triggers the widget automatically. This is a developer beta, so a proper recall gesture could still arrive before the public release in July.

Why this took until iOS 27

The Now Playing widget has been a persistent presence on the Lock Screen since Apple introduced the expanded Lock Screen customization in iOS 16. For four years, the controls appeared whenever audio or video was active and stayed there until the session ended on its own. No amount of tapping or swiping made them go away.

The friction mattered most for people who use their Lock Screen as a glanceable display. A podcast running in the background would push album art and playback controls onto the screen indefinitely, obscuring other widgets or just cluttering the view.

Apple is expected to release iOS 27 as a public beta next month, with the full rollout in the fall. Whether the dismiss-and-restore flow gets a cleaner design before then will be one of the more practical things to watch as the betas progress.