watchOS 10: The MacStories Review

In my watchOS 9 Review last year, I spent the introduction reminiscing on the more exciting days of watchOS yore. Those early years were full of whimsy and foolishness, with many wild and ambitious new features that failed far more often than they succeeded. By my count, it took until watchOS 4 for Apple to find its footing, and by watchOS 6 the predictable pattern of iteration that I laid out last year had begun.

As I said last time, it’s hard to argue against the slow and steady march of watchOS. This software joined with the Apple Watch hardware has resulted in a years-long market domination that shows no sign of stopping. Yet, market be damned, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Health and fitness features were flourishing, but the rest of watchOS never quite felt fully baked.

As it turns out, Apple seems to have agreed.

In watchOS 10, for the first time in years, the iterative update pattern is broken. Rather than the usual handful of minor app updates, new watch faces, and health and fitness features, Apple has instead dropped another major rethink of Apple Watch interaction methods. The side button has been reassigned, the Dock has been demoted, apps have a new design language throughout the system, and widgets have made their Watch debut.

This is the largest year-over-year change to watchOS since version 4, and I am here for it. Let’s jump in and see if Apple has hit the mark this time, or if they’ll be back to the UI drawing board again in the years to come.

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Table of Contents

The Dock and the Side Button

Control Center

Smart Stack

New Systemwide Design Language

Now Playing

Contacts

Home

Watch Faces

Palette

Snoopy

Health and Fitness

Mental Health

Vision Health

Cycling

Hiking

Miscellany

Conclusion

The Dock and the Side Button

Control Center

Smart Stack

New Systemwide Design Language

Now Playing

Contacts

Home

Watch Faces

Palette

Snoopy

Health and Fitness

Mental Health

Vision Health

Cycling

Hiking

Miscellany

Conclusion

The Dock and the Side Button

Control Center

Smart Stack

New Systemwide Design Language

Now Playing

Contacts

Home

Watch Faces

Palette

Snoopy

Health and Fitness

Mental Health

Vision Health

Cycling

Hiking

Miscellany

Conclusion

The Dock and the Side Button

Control Center

Smart Stack

New Systemwide Design Language

Now Playing

Contacts

Home

Watch Faces

Palette

Snoopy

Health and Fitness

Mental Health

Vision Health

Cycling

Hiking

Miscellany

Conclusion

The Dock and the Side Button

Where better to start than a hardware button reassignment? Across all of Apple’s products, a change to the software functionality of a physical button is a rare thing to see. The last time it happened was back in 2016, when Apple reassigned this same button in watchOS 3.

At that time, they were dumping the ignominious Friends interface in favor of the then-new watchOS Dock. Now, after a seven year run, the Dock is out too. Taking its place, for some reason: Control Center.

A single-click of the side button now opens Control Center, and a double-click of the Digital Crown now opens the Dock.

I really can’t say why Control Center is on the Side button. A hardware-bound Control Center does not match the pattern of any other Apple device. Even after months of using watchOS 10, I still look in the wrong place every time before remembering to press the button. I don’t think it’s a natural fit at all.

It feels like all of the core watchOS UI features decided to play a game of musical chairs. The new widgets interface sat down where Control Center used to be, Control Center snagged the seat by the Side button, and the Dock was left standing.

While it may have lost its seat, the Dock hasn’t left the party. It’s still hanging out in the back, now buried behind a double-click of the Digital Crown. Adding insult to injury, it has also lost half of its previous functionality. Despite retaining the name “Dock”, it’s now only a list of your most recently opened apps. The setting to manually choose a list of static “favorites” has been removed.

In this sense, the watchOS Dock is now far more akin to the iOS multitasking interface, right down to the Digital Crown double-click mirroring the old Home button double-click when opening these views. While I’m not sure why Apple is still bothering to title it “Dock”, I otherwise find this to be a fine place for the interface to land. I never used it enough to justify its prime position on the Side button, and based on this change, I’m guessing few others did either.

One complication associated with the Dock’s new position is that double-clicking the Digital Crown already had a behavior in watchOS. This action has long been used to automatically swap back and forth between two apps, or between an app and the watch face. I suppose that feature was the true loser of the musical chairs game, because it no longer exists at all. That said, the Dock is at least a logical successor here: if your muscle memory has you double-clicking the Crown to swap to the last app you used, then now you simply have an extra tap to complete the process of opening it.

I do wish Apple would make the watch face itself accessible from the Dock. In the old system, if you opened a single app and then wanted to hop right back to the watch face, the Digital Crown double-click action would make that happen instantly. Without the watch face showing up in the Dock though, the only method we’re left with is to press the Digital Crown, wait a few moments to make sure you aren’t going to register a double-click, and then press the Crown again. To me, that forced delay feels worse than it would to find the watch face in the Dock interface and tap it.

Control Center

Alright, we have to talk about Control Center. This interface, despite being elevated to the wildly excessive honor of direct hardware access, is entirely unchanged from last year. Not only that, but because Apple has been content to mostly ignore it for its entire existence, it continues to maintain the exact same set of flaws that I admonished it for seven years ago when it was first released. Since nothing has materially changed here, let me just quote myself from my watchOS 3 review in 2016:

Overall, I find Control Center for Apple Watch to be supremely underwhelming as a whole. In the last three months of using watchOS 3, I have only opened it two times with real needs for its functions. Both times were to make my iPhone ring when I couldn’t remember where I had left it in my house.

I’m not against the idea of the upward swipe being tied to Control Center at all, but what surprises and annoys me about the change is that the Now Playing screen is not a part of the new interface.

The “evolution” of Control Center from watchOS 4, to watchOS 8, to watchOS 10.

After seven years, I still only use Control Center to occasionally ring my lost iPhone. I’ve mostly left this interface alone in my last several reviews since it seemed like Apple was uninterested in improving it, and I didn’t feel the need to make the same argument over and over again. However, based on this year’s promotion, Apple has made it clear that they think Control Center is great exactly as it is. Moreover, they think it’s so good that it deserves an even more prominent position than the one it already had. I am here to disabuse them of that notion.

As far as user interfaces go, Control Center is totally fine. It’s a grid of nicely sized buttons that toggle various controls or execute useful utilities. Nothing fancy, but nothing problematic either. My problem with it has not changed since watchOS 3: it just isn’t useful enough to deserve the valuable real estate that it has possessed. If this was the case when said real estate was a swipe up from the watch face, it’s an order of magnitude more true when Control Center ascends from the user interface entirely and takes the throne of a hardware button.

It is such a rare and beautiful opportunity to get to assign a hardware button on an extremely popular device. Apple could have done anything here, including giving non-Ultra Apple Watch users access to the extremely cool customizable Action button. In that case, Apple Watch Ultra users would get two Action buttons, so everybody still wins. But, no, we’re all stuck with Control Center.

I also would have been fine with this change if Apple had done any work to improve Control Center in a way that made it deserving of its new station. Take the extremely obvious idea that I’ve been calling for since watchOS 3: put the Now Playing screen at the top of Control Center. I would love it if I could tap the Side button on my Apple Watch at any moment and immediately control playback of whatever is playing on my iPhone or other nearby devices. Every other Apple platform includes playback controls in their respective Control Centers, but watchOS — despite now having the most easily accessible Control Center of all platforms — does not.

Another quick and easy suggestion: add HomeKit controls to Control Center. Tap the Side button on my Apple Watch and instantly set a lighting scene in my home? Yes, please! How about an Apple TV remote, or buttons to set timers or alarms? I am not having original ideas here, I’m just opening Control Center on my iPhone and looking at what’s there.

For the time being, the Side buttons of all Apple Watch users will be wasted for at least the next year. I guess the good news is that the Side button was already being somewhat wasted on the Dock, and before that it was wasted on the Friends interface. Perhaps someday Apple will show us a good reason for why they even put the Side button on these devices in the first place.

Smart Stack

My disappointment with the Side button change aside, I actually really like what Apple has done with watchOS 10 overall. In particular, the all-new “Smart Stack” interface is a wonderful addition.

The Smart Stack is clearly a descendant of the old Siri watch face, which was a marquee feature in watchOS 4. Both interfaces are made up of the date and time hovering above a vertically-scrolling list of cards, with each card showing information from some app on your Apple Watch. The list is generated automatically, and tries to sort by the most relevant items at any given time.

Left: the Siri watch face in watchOS 5. Right: the new Smart Stack in watchOS 10.

The Siri watch face was a great idea, but I always believed it suffered from being a watch face as opposed to a more general-purpose feature for intelligently surfacing data on the Apple Watch. As I stated in my watchOS 6 review:

I’ve never really felt like the Siri watch face was solving the problem in the right way. If it truly lived up to its expectations then the Siri face would sanitize the Apple Watch experience. Everyone would have to use it or else sacrifice major functionality.

Exactly. The wide variety of watch faces are one of the main factors in making the Apple Watch a truly personal device. Locking everyone into the same Siri watch face in order to access the intelligent cards interface was antithetical to the Apple Watch experience. Apple seems to have come to the same conclusion, because the last time the Siri face received any notable attention was in watchOS 5.

I’m not sure why it took Apple five years to reimagine the Siri watch face in an improved form, but they’ve done it now, and their new solution solves nearly all of the problems I had with the original version. The Smart Stack has taken over Control Center’s old spot directly beneath the watch face. Swiping up on the watch face or turning the Digital Crown upward will slide in the new view. This works on any watch face1, so you’re no longer forced to choose between advanced functionality and personalization.

The Smart Stack interface is very reminiscent of the Siri watch face, but with some notable improvements. First and foremost, you can now tap-and-hold on any card in the stack to access a new editing interface. This includes buttons in the corners to delete the card, or to manually pin it to the top of the list. There is also a large ‘+’ button at the top which you can use to manually add more cards to your stack.

If you don’t add anything manually, most cards will still appear programmatically when your Apple Watch thinks they’re relevant. But, the ability to add exactly what you like — particularly combined with pinning whatever is most important to you to the top — transforms this interface’s functionality from hit-or-miss to beautifully consistent. By default the Smart Stack will use machine learning to attempt to intelligently display what you want before you tell it, just like the Siri watch face did. But for those of us who are willing to put a bit more work into taking control of things, we are empowered to tell the interface what we want (or what we don’t want) when it inevitably gets something wrong.

This is exactly what I always asked for from the Siri face. Machine learning is great, but it’s impossible for it to guess what we want with 100% accuracy. Every time an “intelligent” interface fails to show us something we expect from it, it degrades trust and makes us less likely to think about consulting that interface next time (see: Siri).

Starting with machine learning is a great idea, because it allows new users to get some functionality out of the interface without having to put in any work up front. But as users adjust to it, successes become less special and failures become more jarring. Allowing us to build from the initial machine learning foundation with easy-to-use controls creates a perfect learning curve to help users build a system that works for them personally. This is exactly what the Smart Stack provides, and I love it.

As for the cards themselves, which have now officially received the title of “widgets”, they are made up of small composable data-only interfaces. For now, developers cannot make watchOS widgets interactive, although Apple’s own Now Playing widget does include a functional play/pause button, so hopefully a future update will enable widget interactivity for all watchOS apps.

In the meantime, watchOS widgets are like a far more evolved version of watchOS 1’s Glances. Rather than giant, full-screen views that were inefficient to navigate between, the Smart Stack’s widgets take up a little over one third of the screen. This allows you to fully see two widgets at a time, plus get a glimpse at those remaining in the stack below. Scrolling this interface with the Digital Crown is pleasant and efficient — it’s a great way to quickly move through data from a variety of different apps.

Apple also includes a single special widget that is made up of three circular watchOS complications. You can customize these by tapping and holding on the widget to bring up the Smart Stack’s editing interface. Use the small ‘x’ button to remove an existing complication, which then reveals a larger ‘+’ button to add a new one in its place. If you’d like to only keep one or two of the slots filled, just don’t replace a removed complication and the interface will adjust those remaining to be centered. watchOS apps need to have their complications updated to work with these new versions, so not all circular complications from older apps will be available.

The complications widget is a great addition to the Smart Stack. By default, it sits at the very bottom of the interface at all times. If you’d like quicker access to your three chosen apps though, you can pin it to keep it at (or closer to, depending on your pinning order) the top of the stack.

My one gripe with the Smart Stack is the top of the interface. When you first open it, you’re greeted with a static clock and date which take up fully half of the screen. Seeing as how you just came here from a watch face, re-showing the time is an enormous waste of screen real estate. The date is a bit more forgivable since not all watch faces show it, but I still don’t understand why Apple didn’t just put some customizable complications up here so that we could use this space however we want. Alternatively, they could place a button to open Control Center in this space, thus keeping it fairly easy to access while also freeing up the Side button to become an Action button.

Other than the date and time, I’m loving the Smart Stack. It’s a combination of so many old watchOS ideas which were not bad, but simply executed poorly. Now, finally, Apple has figured out an effective interface for showing quick bits of glanceable information from apps throughout the system, choosing and sorting those bits algorithmically, and still enabling their most invested users to make customizations. More of this everywhere, please.

New Systemwide Design Language

watchOS 10 includes a refreshed design language throughout the system. App interfaces have been expanded all the way to the screen edges, and most buttons have transitioned to circular icons which float above the interface layer. All of Apple’s first party apps have been upgraded to this new design.

I find the new design language to be an improvement across the board. The expanded interfaces and floating buttons create a very pleasant effect. The new buttons appear similar to circular complications from the watch face, making them feel instantly familiar and natural to use. It’s not all form over function either; the changes in many apps have resulted in more data being fit into the same screen real estate, or enabled better navigation or access to controls in more intuitive ways.

While we don’t need to go into all of them, we’ll take a quick look at the changes in a few different apps which are representative of the new design.

Now Playing

The Now Playing screen in the Audiobooks app in watchOS 9 (left) and watchOS 10 (right).

The Now Playing screen has been updated significantly, as have its embedded versions in the Audiobooks, Podcasts, and Music apps. Pictured above is the Audiobooks version, although they all look essentially the same. While the information density of this interface isn’t particularly improved, it certainly looks a lot nicer.

The AirPlay and playback speed controls have been moved to a menu behind the button in the top-right corner. While this technically removes some single-tap functionality, in practice I don’t think most users need either of these controls often enough for that to be a huge deal. Playback speed in particular made for easy accidental taps in the old design, which was quite annoying since you had to continue tapping until you cycled all the way back around to the speed that you wanted. The new control behind the menu includes ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons so that you can easily adjust speed back and forth.

Contacts

Viewing a contact in the Contacts app in watchOS 9 (left) and watchOS 10 (right).

The Contacts app has embraced Apple’s new Contact Posters feature, making for a far more dramatic interface than the older version. Despite the new full-bleed layout, Apple still managed to fit another button on the first page of the interface.

The incoming call screen in watchOS 10 sports a very similar interface, Contact Poster and all. These new interfaces make their year-ago versions look instantly outdated, and I am very much a fan of the changes.

Home

The Home app in watchOS 9 (left) and watchOS 10 (right).

The design changes to the Home app look initially quite subtle, but they represent something that Apple is doing across many apps on the system. By moving the page title from a huge word on the top left to a much smaller caption on the right, they’ve cleared up space to add nice navigation buttons in more areas of the interface.

For Home, Apple used this change to shake up the app’s hierarchy. Now rather than having to scroll all the way down your list of devices to get to other rooms, you instead just hit the back button to access a new screen with options to open a certain room or a list of scenes. Especially if you have more than 5 or so devices, this is a definite improvement over the previous setup.

Watch Faces

The first thing to note for watch faces in watchOS 10 is that you can no longer swipe from the edge of your screen to switch between them. Instead, you now need to first tap and hold to enter the edit view for watch faces, at which point you can switch to a different face and then tap to select it. I’m still not quite used to this change, but I think it’s the right move either way. I mostly only used the edge-swipe to get back to my main watch face whenever an accidental gesture changed it.

One of the most exciting things about the Smart Stack is that it unburdens the watch face from being the only avenue for customization and quick access to information on watchOS. Now that a quick swipe up or a spin of the Digital Crown can reveal a host of information and utility, the pressure is off for every watch face to support advanced features like complications.

I know that that pressure has never really stopped Apple from doing what it wants on watch faces, but for more advanced Apple Watch users, it always made most of the faces feel disqualified before they even had a chance. I certainly have a long history of criticizing watch faces for this very reason. Choosing a watch face with no or very few complications meant cutting yourself off from a significant amount of features on your Apple Watch.

The Smart Stack releases this tension. For the first time I feel free to experiment with low-utility watch faces, because even greater utility than complications ever granted is very easily accessible.

Obviously, complications still have a leg up for certain use cases due to their showing information with zero taps rather than first requiring a user interaction, but that now feels like a more scoped use case. Rather than deciding between having any access to easily accessible data from apps, you’re now just deciding on your willingness to interact with your device before seeing that data. If you need instantly glanceable info, there are tons of watch faces with complications. If you are okay with first spinning the Digital Crown before getting to that same info (and much more), you can now use any watch face you please. This is a far more reasonable set of tradeoffs to consider than it was before.

With all that in mind, let’s take our usual look at this year’s new watch faces.

Palette

There’s not too much to say about Palette. It’s a perfectly nice watch face which fits comfortably into the increasingly packed category of simple, colorful faces. Palette has four corner complications, and includes a vast array of colorization choices. The strongest advantage Palette holds over existing color-based watch faces is its nice effect when the always-on display is dimmed. Palette features multiple regions of color, each of which follows one of the hands around the watch face. When dimmed, the second hand’s colors disappear and leave behind a very nice sweeping gradient which goes from black to saturated as it catches up with the hour and minute hands. This effect is similar to the Gradient face’s dimmed mode, but I find Palette’s version more pleasing.

Snoopy

Finally, the main event. I’m as surprised to be writing this as any long-time followers of my watchOS reviews will be to read it, but I love the Snoopy watch face. I have been using it as my daily-driver face for nearly four months now, and I’m still not sick of it. This watch face is an absolute triumph of whimsical, amusing design.

The Snoopy watch face consists of two animated characters, Snoopy and Woodstock, from the Peanuts comic strip. Over the course of each day, whenever you raise your wrist, you’ll find Snoopy (and often, though not always, Woodstock) engaging in some form of shenanigans on your watch face. Amazingly, these characters will actively interact with the hour and minute hands on the watch face, no matter what time of day it may be. At midnight, Snoopy might slide down the hands like they’re a fire pole. Around the 15th or 45th minute of any given hour, you may find him napping on the minute hand.

Increasing the fun and intrigue is the fact that the animations can even depend on the weather, the current season, or what activity you’re currently doing. Going for swim? You may find Snoopy surfing a wave on your watch face. Raining outside? Snoopy’s popping open his umbrella. Fall has arrived? Snoopy is raking together a leaf pile.

There are at least 148 unique animations for this watch face, according to a fascinating inside look that GQ managed to land. That article also described the engineering feats it took to bring this watch face to life:

If you’re going to the effort of sketching out Snoopy as he rides his kibble bowl down the minute hand, that helter-skelter-style joyride needs to have the opportunity to show up more than once an hour. So Apple’s engineers created a whole scene layout engine that can rotate certain clips by six degrees every minute, as well as a Snoopy decision engine that figures out the optimal time to showcase them without too much repetition.

Excellent. And in practice, they nailed this. Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll just look at a bunch of Snoopy animations in a row, and there is almost never a duplicate within those short timespans. Even after four months I don’t think I’ve seen all the tricks Snoopy has up his sleeves — just last week I saw at least two or three animations that I had never witnessed before (they were fall-based, so I think he’s still holding back some seasonal fun).

Adding even more fun to the equation is the watch face’s default “Sunday Surprise” color scheme. There isn’t much to the surprise (I had hoped for custom Sunday-only animations, but it’s more just charming than particularly surprising), but if you really don’t want it spoiled then you should skip the next paragraph.

While you can manually choose a colored background for the Snoopy face to hold at all times, if you leave it on Sunday Surprise then the background will be gray. There is also a dotted texture to it, making it appear like the newspapers that Peanuts was originally printed on. The Sunday Surprise is a tribute to Sunday comics, in which newspapers print a full-color comics section on Sundays. As such, every Sunday the Snoopy face will spend the day showing a different colorful background each time you raise your wrist.

Despite the relative subtlety of the Sunday Surprise, I’ve grown fond of it anyway. Maybe it’s the nature of my remote job making the days sort of blend together, but the Sunday Surprise always gives me a pleasant reminder that another week has begun. I smile every week the first time I see it on my wrist.

Unsurprisingly given the complex animations at play, the Snoopy watch face includes no complication slots. Last year this would have frustrated me, and I do still slightly wish that they’d managed to include one or two in the top corners (where the animations rarely make contact). That said, in the new age of the Smart Stack, this feels more like a minor inconvenience than a disqualifying factor.

I encourage everyone to at least give the Snoopy watch face a shot. I did so with little expectation that I’d keep it going forward, and I was tremendously surprised by how much I enjoyed it. There’s just something so very satisfying about these animations. After learning how much engineering effort went into them, I get where that satisfaction is coming from.

Health and Fitness

Despite the sweeping changes across watchOS 10, Apple still found time to make its annual advancements to health and fitness features in watchOS. This year, they focused on several areas: mental health, vision health, cycling workouts, and hiking features.

Mental Health

Apple is continuing to expand the Apple Watch Mindfulness app in watchOS 10. This year they have added a new ‘State of Mind’ option to the app, which seeks to help users monitor their mental wellbeing over time.

Users who want to take advantage of this new feature will need to get in the habit of opening the Mindfulness app on regular basis to log how they’re currently feeling. Once you’ve done so for the first time, the Mindfulness app will prompt you to enable reminder notifications two times daily. Each time you return, you can choose between logging how you’re feeling right now, or how you’ve felt on this day overall.

Whichever option you choose, you’ll be taken to an interface with a horizontally scrolling list of feelings. Starting at ‘Neutral’, you can scroll upward into negative feelings (‘Slightly Unpleasant’, ‘Unpleasant’, or ‘Very Unpleasant’), or downward into positive feelings (‘Slightly Pleasant’, ‘Pleasant’, or ‘Very Pleasant’). After picking one of these high-level feelings, the app will then ask ‘What best describes this feeling?’, and provide a variety of more descriptive single-word options for you to choose from, such as ‘Calm’, ‘Content’, ‘Indifferent’, or ‘Drained’, among many others. Finally, you’ll be asked ‘What’s having the biggest impact on you?’, from which you can pick from a long list of categories, including ‘Work’, ‘Health’, ‘Fitness’, and ‘Family’.

As you record State of Mind data, it will be aggregated into the Health app on your iPhone. You can find it by opening Health, navigating to ‘Show All Health Data’, and tapping into the ‘State of Mind’ category. This view will display your historical data, including in the form of a nicely plotted chart, so that you can start to get a sense of how you are feeling over time, and what’s causing these feelings.

Vision Health

Apple Watches running watchOS 10 will now track how much time you’re spending in the sunlight. This data is logged in the Health app, and can be a helpful new way to ensure you’re spending enough time outside. According to Apple, not spending enough time outdoors is the leading cause of nearsightedness in children, so this new metric may be particularly helpful for parents to ensure that their kids are maintaining their vision health.

Cycling

Via Apple.

For cyclists with both an Apple Watch and an iPhone, watchOS 10 and iOS 17 are pairing up this year to support a new Live Activity. Now when you start a cycling workout on your Apple Watch, a Live Activity for the workout will activate automatically on your iPhone. Tapping will open a new full-screen view of your workout metrics on your iPhone.

This feature has been specifically created for cyclists due to the prevalence of phone mounts on bikes. If you have your phone mounted to your handlebars, you can now keep open a huge, easily glanceable view of your current workout metrics.

watchOS 10 also allows the Apple Watch to automatically connect to various Bluetooth cycling accessories, such as power meters and speed and cadence sensors. If connected, these sensors will power a new slate of workout metrics, including cycling power (watts), cadence, and Functional Threshold Power (FTP). The FTP data drives the watchOS 10 workout app’s new Power Zones metric view, which is very similar to last year’s heart rate zones metric.

Hiking

Via Apple.

While hiking in watchOS 10, the Compass app will automatically drop two new waypoints: the last place you had a cellular connection, and the last place you had a connection to make an emergency call. The former will of course give you access to all of your usual cellular capabilities, including calling anyone or sending text messages. The latter looks for the last known connection you had with any carrier’s network, such that you could make an emergency call.

In the watchOS 10 Maps app, maps will now display a topographic overlay with shading and contouring for hills and elevation details. Maps can also now search for nearby hiking trails and trailheads. Tapping into one of these will show information on trail length, type, and difficulty.

Miscellany

Apple’s new NameDrop contact sharing feature is also coming to watchOS 10. Hold your Apple Watch close to someone else’s iPhone who doesn’t have your contact info to share it with them.

Offline maps downloaded to your iPhone on iOS 17 can also be accessed on a paired watchOS 10 Apple Watch.

FaceTime video messages can be viewed from Apple Watch, and Group FaceTime audio is now supported for the first time in watchOS 10.

The Medications app can now send follow-up reminders when you fail to log a scheduled medication within 30 minutes.

Conclusion

Apple has been playing it safe with watchOS updates for the last several years. While none of these updates have been bad, and are often particularly great for health and fitness, the rest of the platform has remained mostly static. I’ve grown increasingly worried that Apple thought watchOS was “done” — that its final form was more a vehicle for health and fitness than a fully-fledged computer watch. This year, Apple made it decidedly clear that that is not the case.

I don’t want to return to the early years of watchOS, when huge parts of the operating system were changing every year; but I do believe that Apple has not yet made the Apple Watch the best that it can be. I’d like to see the company get there, and watchOS 10 includes some tremendously positive steps toward that goal.

Before we can address the positives, it’s still important to consider the negatives. I think the assignment of the hardware button to Control Center, without updating the Control Center interface at all, was downright lazy. It feels as though Apple knew they wanted to place the Smart Stack where Control Center was (a perfectly reasonable idea), but didn’t put in the work to think of a new place for Control Center to live where it would actually make sense. Perhaps the company has future plans to add functionality to Control Center that makes it deserving of this hardware accessibility, but if that’s the case then it’s still lazy to ship it as-is while knowing it’s not yet good enough.

I really hope Apple addresses this situation in next year’s update in one way or another. I can understand if it just didn’t have time to get to some planned Control Center improvements this year, but if so then let’s hope Apple feels the pressure to ship those improvements by watchOS 11. Alternatively, I wouldn’t mind at all if the company reconsiders Control Center again, making it a software button at the top of the Smart Stack, and changes the Side button into an Action button.

Speaking of the Smart Stack, this interface is such a great addition to watchOS. Many years of good watchOS ideas which just didn’t quite work out have finally been distilled into something that feels functional. watchOS apps have a new avenue to get glanceable information in front of users, and users can access this information no matter which watch face they choose to use.

The interface itself isn’t perfect yet. I’d love to see Apple rethink the placement of the enormous date and time at the top of it. Give us customizable complication slots up there, or add that button to open Control Center (why not both?). For a first shot though, I think that there’s a lot to love about the customizable scrolling list of widgets that make up the rest of this interface. The Smart Stack is already useful and useable as it is, and I’m excited to see Apple iterate on it going forward.

As for the rest of watchOS 10, Apple hasn’t missed a beat. Health and fitness have received their usual grouping of improvements. This time around it is cyclists and hikers getting some really nice new features. The new State of Mind tracker in the Mindfulness app is a potentially meaningful feature for anyone, and I encourage everyone to at least give it a try to see if it sticks. Finally, throughout all of Apple’s first-party apps, they found time to make upgrades to a beautiful new interface design language.

My qualms with Control Center aside, I think it’s clear that watchOS 10 is the best update to the Apple Watch operating system in years. It’s so great to see that Apple is still willing to rethink the Apple Watch in ways that don’t revolve around health and fitness. I’m more excited about this operating system than I’ve been in a long time, and I can’t wait too see Apple continue to iterate on these new foundations in the years to come.

watchOS 10 was released in September, and is available for all Apple Watches Series 4 and later. If you haven’t already, try the Snoopy watch face.

Except for, amusingly, the Siri watch face itself, which maintains its own outdated cards interface. watchOS 10 takes the Siri face from arguably the most functional watch face to objectively the least functional. I imagine this watch face only still exists to avoid breaking compatibility with any holdouts out there who are still using it. If that's you, well, props for hanging in there through five years of essentially no updates, but the time has come to make the switch. ↩︎