watchOS 9: The MacStories Review

As we enter the ninth iteration of watchOS, I must admit that I sometimes find myself looking back wistfully on the computer watch that the Apple Watch once was. My inner tech nerd misses the wild, blind shots at digital connection and interface design which we were gifted by an Apple that had not yet figured out what the mass market wanted from this device.

In many ways, the early days of the Apple Watch feel like echoes from a bygone era of Apple; an era in which it was more willing to throw things at the wall just to see what stuck. This is, after all, the company which brought us the buttonless iPod shuffle, the hockey puck mouse, brushed metal, the tape-recorder Podcast app, and so much more. We tend to call it Apple’s sense of “whimsy”, and early watchOS had plenty of it.

Time Traveling in watchOS 2.

In watchOS 2, Apple shipped a feature called Time Travel where you could spin the Digital Crown to “travel backwards and forwards in time”. Complications would move alongside the watch hands to reflect their past or predicted future values. Time Travel was demoted to a setting in watchOS 3, and quietly removed entirely some time later.

There was also the concept of Glances beginning all the way back in watchOS 1. Glances were single-page app interfaces accessible by swiping up from the watch face, then swiping side-to-side to switch between them. Third-party apps could create these, and the watch supported up to 20 of them. Glances were also canned in watchOS 3. They were replaced by the Dock, which never quite managed to capture the same energy.

For years, Apple seemed particularly interested in the potential of the Apple Watch to be a core hub for personal communication. Until watchOS 3, the hardware side button on the device was dedicated to opening the Friends interface. When interacting with your friends, you could send giant animated emojis — perhaps a very early precursor to the Memoji that we have today. And of course, no one could forget Digital Touch. Who among us did not feel more connected to our loved ones when tapping out pings and drawing shapes on their wrists1?

The Friends interface in watchOS 2.

What leaves me feeling so conflicted is that, ultimately, all of the above features were pretty bad. No one used the Friends interface, Time Travel wasn’t particularly useful, third-party Glances were kneecapped by their lack of interactivity, and communicating from an Apple Watch has always just been way more work than pulling out your iPhone. Apple was right to kill all of these features in their time, but I still can’t stop missing the days when my Apple Watch was searching for more variety in purpose than it exists with today.

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Pillow

Pillow: Sleeping better, made simple.

Today’s Apple Watch is a well-oiled machine of health and fitness. The gains in these areas are extraordinary, and these devices have been quite literally life saving for many people. The Apple Watch is an incredible device, but it does now feel born of the more polished, mass-market Apple of the last decade. The rough, exploratory edges of its early days have been diamond-chamfered into a near-mirror finish.

As I discussed in my watchOS 9 preview story earlier this summer, watchOS updates have settled into a fairly pronounced pattern at this point. Apple knows exactly what it wants from this device and its operating system, and it executes on that year after year. The formula, ordered by Apple’s own emphasis, looks essentially like this:

Improvements to the Workout app

New health features

New watch faces

One or two brand-new first-party apps

One or two redesigned first-party apps

A system-level feature or improvement

This direction has led to years of remarkably tight annual updates. Everything (with the exception of watch faces) in each new version of watchOS is solid. Every improvement is well thought out, helpful, and useable.

I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. Each year, Apple delivers a high quality and effective watchOS update. I just don’t think this operating system is as finished as these updates seem to imply that it is. There was merit in the ideas of early watchOS, even if the execution wasn’t quite there yet.

For now, though, Apple soldiers on; relentlessly improving the areas of watchOS which have propelled the device to huge heights of popularity. It’s hard to argue that they aren’t doing everything right.

Let’s leave the past behind for a bit, and take a look at what Apple’s winning formula has delivered in watchOS 9.

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Improvements to Workout

Apple’s Workout app for Apple Watch is seeing its biggest update in years in watchOS 9. While the interface is remaining mostly the same, the active workout view has been packed full of brand-new metrics, and you can now create custom workout types.

In all prior version of watchOS, the active workout interface in the Workout app has consisted of three horizontally-scrolling screens. On the left is a panel of buttons to control your workout, in the middle is the workout metrics screen, and on the right is the audio control screen. In watchOS 9, while the left and right screens have not been changed, the central workout metrics screen has far more going on.

The metrics screen can now be scrolled vertically as well as horizontally, with each new view in the stack consisting of even more metrics for you to look at during your workouts. Depending on the workout that you are undertaking, you get different options for these views. All options can be enabled or disabled by customizing the workout.

Customizing Workout Views

Workout views can be easily customized from the main workouts list on watchOS while you are not actively running a workout. Just tap the ‘…’ button that shows up in the top-right corner of each workout card. This will bring you to an all-new details interface for setting up your workout, with a list of goal cards that you can filter using the buttons in the top right.

“Goals” are the Apple Watch’s longstanding workout subtypes. Choosing between each goal sets up the main metrics that you wish to track during your workout. For instance, in an Outdoor Run workout you may wish to focus on your time, the distance that you are running, or the calories that you are burning. Each of these options, and several others, show up as goals in the Workout app, and can be selected when you begin a workout.

The most common type of goal is the generic “open” goal, which you’ve likely seen before since all of the app’s default workouts use it. If you aren’t specifically training a particular type of running or other workout metric, then the open goal is the one to use.

In watchOS 9, from each workout’s details interface, you can now tap the pencil button in the top-right corner to edit the goal. Editing allows you to set up alerts based on certain metrics, or to edit the metric views. Alerts are nice if you want to be made aware mid-workout when you are on/off your target for heart rate, pace, time, or other metric. Metric views make up the vertical stack that can be scrolled through during an active workout.

Tapping into the ‘Workout Views’ option gives you a preview of which views you have set up for this workout. If you wish to make changes, just tap the ‘Edit Views’ button to enter the editing interface. From here you can enable or disable any views to ensure that you are only seeing the metrics that interest you. You can also tap the edit buttons available on certain views to make changes to them.

Currently the only editable views are the ‘Metrics’ and ‘Metrics 2’ views. These will be familiar to Apple Watch users because they’re the same view that the workouts app has always had in its central screen. However, in watchOS 9, not only can you add a second metrics view, but you can also customize the exact metrics that show up in either one. You can add and remove metrics, or even reorder them using the editing interface.

The other metric views are Heart Rate Zones, Splits, Segments, Elevation, and Activity Rings. These cannot be edited granularly, but can be enabled or disabled so that unnecessary metrics don’t take up space in your stack.

If you wish to reorder the stack of metric views themselves, just scroll to the bottom of the view editing interface and tap the ‘Reorder’ button, then move them around to your heart’s content.

Once you have your workout views set up, you can navigate between them during an active workout either by scrolling with your finger or by spinning the Digital Crown. In previous iterations of watchOS, spinning the Digital Crown on the active workout view would cause the highlighted metric to change. As of watchOS 9, there’s no longer any way to change which metric is highlighted while working out. That said, if you only care about a specific metric, you can easily just customize the workout views so that the data you care about shows up at the top rather than being buried elsewhere.

Customizing Workouts

Apple didn’t finish there with its changes to the Workout app in watchOS 9. The company also added the ability to create entirely custom workouts by combining smaller segments.

Specifically, these are custom workout goals, which means they take place within the confines of a particular type of workout. For instance, if you are creating a custom outdoor run workout, then you would first tap into the ‘Outdoor Run’ card’s details view via the ‘…’ button, then scroll to the very bottom and tap the ‘Create Workout’ button. Choose the ‘Custom’ option to begin setting up your workout. This works the same no matter which type of workout you are customizing, with the exception of the multisport workout type that we will get to momentarily.

Within the customization interface, you can choose to set up a warmup or a cooldown for your workout. Each of these can be configured as a particular type of goal, such as warming up for a run based on distance or time. You can also pick the “open” goal type for your warmup or cooldown.

Depending on the goal you pick, your warmup or cooldown will either end automatically (once the specified time has elapsed or distance has been traveled), or in the case of the open goal type, will end only when you manually double-tap your watch screen to end it.

Between the warmup and cooldown, you can add any number of ‘Work’ and ‘Recovery’ steps to your workout. You can also configure sets of these work/recovery steps to be repeated a number of times. Using these building blocks, you can design a workout to exactly match the training regimen that you are undertaking.

Once you’ve designed your custom workout, you can activate it by finding its overarching workout type in the main interface of the Workout app, tapping the ‘…’ button, and then selecting your custom workout from the list. This number of steps feels a bit clunky, but if you run the same workout type consistently enough then it will probably get elevated to the main interface so that you can activate it with one tap.

I say probably because there’s no manual way to control which workout goal shows up in the top-level interface of the Workout app. By default it is generally the ‘Open’ goal for each workout, but if you configure and run a custom workout then that one usually gets swapped into the top position. In my testing though, the custom workouts sometimes just don’t get pushed to the top.

The default workout goal is based on the ‘suggested’ filter when you tap into a workout’s details view. This filter is an Apple black-box, so when it doesn’t suggest the workout that you want at the top level, you’re just going to have to tap into the full list and find the right one. I wish Apple would just give us the option to configure this list ourselves and select whichever default we want.

If you do get stuck with a default workout goal that you never use, one option to fix the issue is to tap into the details view, swipe left on the offending goal, and delete it entirely. This triggers a reorder of Apple’s suggested list and in my testing often resulted in my most recently used workout (which will generally be the one I want) getting elevated to the top of the list. You can always add deleted goals back later with the ‘Create Workout’ button in the corresponding workout’s details view.

The Multisport Workout

The multisport workout is a brand new type this year. It combines swimming, cycling, and running workouts with interim transition periods to enable smoothly tracking triathlon metrics via the Apple Watch. This is sure to be a very useful advancement for triathletes, as the only way to make something like this happen previously was to waste time fiddling with the Apple Watch interface to switch workouts between each leg. Another option would have been to just track the entire exercise using a generic “open” goal, but then you would miss out on the valuable sport-specific metrics for swimming, cycling, and running.

By default, the multisport workout type tracks each leg automatically, including tracking the between-leg transitional periods as their own separate sections. As a nice touch, the Apple Watch automatically puts itself into Water Lock mode during the swimming leg, disabling the touch screen until you hold the Digital Crown down for a few seconds, at which point it plays noises to eject any water from the speaker holes.

I didn’t attempt a triathlon to test this, but I’ll admit that I did spend some time in my apartment waving my arms around in the attempt to trick my watch into thinking I was swimming. Unsurprisingly, I was unable to outsmart the device’s swim-stroke-attuned sensors, so it just immediately put me into a transitional period. Presumably this will work great if you actually undertake a triathlon.

If the real-world automatic tracking doesn’t work for you — or if you just don’t want to leave your metric tracking up to Apple’s attempts at guessing each leg — you can customize each multisport workout goal such that they only transition manually. In this case, you’ll need to swipe over to the leftmost screen and tap the ‘Next’ button each time you finish a leg to switch to the transition period, then tap ‘Next’ again to begin the next leg. Don’t forget that after the swimming leg you’ll need to spend a few seconds holding the Digital Crown in order to release the water lock.

The multisport workout is an outlier when it comes to customization. Rather than giving you the standard customization view that all other workout goals grant access to, multisport’s customization view only allows adding and reordering each leg. You can choose between indoor and outdoor run, swim, and cycle workouts.

The metric views for individual multisport workout types cannot be adjusted, which seems like an oversight to me. Hopefully Apple will allow further customization of each workout leg next year.

That said, you can use the multisport customization interface to set up any manner of run/bike/swim workout that you are planning to undertake. Duathlon athletes can use this to eliminate the swimming leg, and it may also be useful for training by switching legs to indoor, or eliminating legs entirely.

New Workout Metrics

In watchOS 9, the Workout app can now track vertical oscillation (how much you move vertically during each stride), stride length, ground contact time, and running power. These join the previous cadence and pace metrics to present an ambitious portfolio of metrics for runners. For most non-running workouts, these metrics won’t be available.

There is also a new “heart rate zone” metric, which shows up for most workout types, and is available as its own view in the new stack of workout views. Heart rate zones track your heart’s beats per minute over time throughout your workout, and can help present you with data regarding which zones of effort your heart is operating in as your workout progresses.

By default, heart rate zones are configured automatically by watchOS using your monthly average resting heart rate and your monthly maximum heart rate. These max and resting values are updated on the first day of every month, and can be found in the watchOS Settings app under Workout > Heart Rate Zones. If you’d rather set your heart rate zones up manually, you can do so from that settings panel as well.

Finally, the Fitness app for iOS 16 has been updated with a new details view to give better insights into your workout metrics over time. The Fitness app has long had a confounding lack of interactivity and information density, with graphs of heart rate data and route maps which cannot be drilled into at all to see exact metrics. In iOS 16, Apple is sort of fixing this.

The main screen of the Fitness app has had its design tweaked, but remains mostly the same overall. You will see a list of your workouts going back in time, and can tap into any of them to enter its details view. This main details view also remains mostly the same, other than some minor design changes. A graph of heart rate data is shown toward the bottom, and you can tap into it to expand it and also see your post-workout heart rate graph. Neither of these graphs show any granular data though, and neither of them are interactive in any way.

However, the updated Fitness app also includes a new ‘Workout Details’ header with a ‘Show More’ button next to it. If you tap that button, you’ll be taken to a brand-new details view inside of the main details view. This view shows a nearly identical heart rate graph, as well as a map of your route and graphs for other metrics such as pace, elevation, and cadence.

For some reason, these graphs have been deemed special enough to be interactive. You can tap and hold on them to see granular data from each graph show up, and even see an indication on the map of your exact location when the data points were being gathered. You can move your finger back and forth to see your exact route as you undertook it slide across the map.

The interfaces inside of the Fitness app are frustratingly inconsistent. I struggle to understand how Apple can’t make some simple and straightforward metric views even after years of this app existing. Every graph in this app should be interactive, and you should be able to zoom in and out of them to drill down to more granular levels. Instead, Apple remains committed to making the interface appear simple and attractive above all else, sacrificing usability in the process.

The new interactive graph view is of course a step in the right direction, but since the view is hidden so deeply in the app, and since every other similar interface trains users that these graphs are not interactive, I fear that few people are going to discover the availability of these new insights.

New Health Features

Fitness and health are the two primary targets in any good watchOS update, and this year Apple has two new health-related features for us to enjoy. The brand-new Medications app turns the Apple Watch into a convenient tracker and reminder for medications, and the sleep tracking system has been upgraded to collect more in-depth metrics.

Medications

Medications is a new first-party app for Apple Watch, as well as a panel in the Health app on iOS. Before you can use the watchOS app you’ll need to set the feature up in Health on your iPhone.

The goal of this feature is to help you track any and all medications that you take. You enter your medications into the Health app, and configure time intervals at which you need to be taking them. You can also set up as-needed medications for those that you only take when you need them.

Since Medications is a subsection of Health, you’ll have to find it in the Health app in order to set it up. For me it was initially shown prominently in a recommended block under the ‘Get More From Health’ heading. However, after setting the feature up and then coming back to the Health app later, that block was no longer recommended, and it took me a minute to figure out how to find the feature again. Ultimately I needed to go to the ‘Browse’ tab in the bottom-right corner and find the ‘Medications’ category from there.

If you want to maintain easy access to the Medications interface, you’ll probably want to add it as a favorite by tapping the ‘Edit’ button next to the Favorites section of the Summary tab. From then on you’ll be able to find it in the list of favorited features.

At this point in time, I struggle to understand why Apple keeps stuffing significant new features into the Health app. Especially in the modern era of iOS where we can delete unused first-party apps, I wish Apple would be less afraid to just spin up new apps on iOS that match their watchOS counterparts. The Medications interface in Health is entirely different from the rest of the app, so it’s already like Apple is hiding an app inside of a different one. It would be far less confusing and more convenient for users if Medications was a first-party iOS app just like it is on the Watch. For now though, we’re stuck in Health.

Once you successfully find your way to the Medications interface on iOS, you can began adding your medications. Tap the ‘Add a Medication’ button and type a name into the search field to find it. Or better yet, just tap the camera icon and point your iPhone camera at your medication’s container.

The camera lookup feature is impressively accurate. I tried it against a variety of items that I found in my house, from pill bottles to spray bottles to ointments. Never once did the app fail to identify exactly what the medication was, as well as the strength and unit of measurement if defined on the container.

The reason that Apple wants to identify your exact medications from its data sources is for another feature: drug interactions. This information shows up beneath your list of configured medications, and will attempt to inform you if a combination of medications that you’re taking may react with each other in potentially harmful ways.

The drug interactions feature has three tiers of alerts: ‘Critical’, meaning you absolutely should not take these medications together unless explicitly told to by your doctor; ‘Serious’, meaning there may be significant side effects but they’re unlikely to be life-threatening; and ‘moderate’, meaning there may be mild side effects or the drugs might not work as well together. You can see more details about these tiers by tapping the ‘Drug Interactions’ header and then tapping the information icon.

The drug interactions feature can also optionally check for interactions with common lifestyle factors such as alcohol, cannabis, and tobacco consumption. These factors are disabled by default, likely because they seem to trigger the ‘Serious’ interaction type for many common non-prescription drugs. For instance, I added Ibuprofen and Tylenol to my list of as-needed medications, and both showed us under the category of serious interactions with alcohol.

While Apple is clearly being careful to not cause unnecessary alarm here, they’re also not wrong that even extremely common medications like Tylenol can have serious health effects when consumed alongside too much alcohol. When drilling down into the details view about these interactions, the descriptive text is a great explainer and didn’t read as scare-mongering to me at all. I think it would have benefited users more to leave these “life factor” interactions on by default. If you want to enable them yourself, you can do so by tapping into the ‘Drug Interactions’ panel in the Medications sections of the iOS Health app, then tapping the ‘Edit’ button in the ‘Interaction Factors’ block.

Okay, back to adding medications. Once the app has identified the medication that you’re trying to add, you get to configure the form in which you are taking it. Options are wide-ranging, from capsules to chewable tablets to creams to spray bottles and many more. Next up, you set the strength and unit type (such as a unit of milligrams and a strength of 200, if you’re taking a 200mg tablet). Then you set the frequency (with options ranging from daily to every other day to specific days of the week, and more), or select ‘As Needed’.

Finally, the fun part: you get to create a nice icon for your medication. Apple has designed an interface with all kinds of forms of medications, from various tablet shapes to pill bottles to ointment tubes. Select a shape, then set a color (or sometimes even multiple colors) for the shape, and another color for the background.

Finish things off by setting an optional display name (for example, I set my daily allergy medication to the display name “Allergy Pill” rather than the technical name “Loratadine”) and adding any notes about this medication which you may want for your own future reference.

Earlier in the beta cycle Apple was only allowing users to create medications that Apple could match via their data sources. Thankfully they have loosened that restriction up for the official release version. If you need to add a medication that doesn’t match Apple’s list, you can just tap the ‘Add’ button at the bottom of the screen to create a custom medication. Be wary, as doing this will result in the medication not being checked by the drug interactions feature, but it’s a good way to deal with Apple not having your particular medication in its list. You can also add custom medication strength values if the strength of your particular medication doesn’t show up in Apple’s default list of options.

Once you’ve finished setting up your medications, the watchOS 9 Medications app can actually be used. The app consists of a single list view, with the top of the list showing all of the medications that you are scheduled to take today. You can tap into any of these medications to log them as either taken or skipped.

Any medications that you have logged today show up in the next section as you scroll down in the app. You can tap into these to undo logging them, or swap them from taken to skipped or vice-versa. If you forgot to log a medication at the right time of day, then from this interface you can also tap on the block with the logged time shown to open an editing interface. From there you can change the amount of the medication taken, or adjust the time at which you took it.

Finally, as you scroll to the bottom section of the app, you’ll find your full list of configured medications. This is the section you’ll go to when you wish to log an as-needed medication, since those will never show up in the top section. Just tap into the medication that you’re looking for and tap the ‘Log’ button and it will be logged as taken at that time.

The final aspect of the Medications feature is the notifications, and unfortunately I have a significant complaint about them. When you configure medications to be taken at a particular time and frequency, the app will dutifully send you a notification on both your Apple Watch and your iPhone. This notification includes three options: log the medication as taken, log it as skipped, or remind you again in 10 minutes. Those options are great, but the problem arises in the fact that these notifications aren’t sticky.

If you’ve ever set up a time-based reminder in the Reminders app, then you’ll know the kind of notifications that I’m talking about. Reminders notifications will always stay on your Lock Screen even if you tap on them to open the Reminders app. The only ways to make them go away are either to explicitly swipe them left and clear them, or to mark the corresponding reminder as done.

It’s kind of wild to me that timely Medications notifications don’t operate in this exact same way. If you receive a Medications notification and then accidentally tap into it before you’re actively on your way to take your med, then the notification will be dismissed. And since you didn’t explicitly choose the “remind me again in 10 minutes” option, you will never be reminded about it again. This is very much a recipe for forgetting to take important medications.

The notification issue is really my only complaint regarding an otherwise fantastic addition to watchOS and iOS. I’m really happy with how Apple built this feature, and I think it’s going to be huge for many users. That said, I do think that the notification issue is a significant setback. People can’t be moving their important medication reminders to this app and then missing the notifications to take their meds.

Notifications here should either be sticky like reminders, or should automatically repeat themselves when not interacted with like Due. I hope Apple changes this behavior sooner rather than later — preferably in a dot update so that we don’t have to wait a whole year.

Sleep Tracking

Sleep tracking has received a nice upgrade this year, adding the ability to track more granular levels of sleep. If you sleep with your Apple Watch on and Apple’s tracking system active, you’ll now see your sleeping patterns split up into four separate levels: Awake, REM, Core, and Deep.

The Sleep section of the Health app for iOS (another app inside of an app) will show you graphs of your sleep data, and these graphs are actually interactive. You can tap on any hour of data in the single-day view to see the exact period of time that you were in the corresponding level of sleep. In the week, month, and six month views (available from the tabs at the top of the graph), you can tap into any day to see the amount of time you spent “in bed” vs “asleep”. Tap on the ‘Show More Sleep Data’ button to access the single-day view for whatever day you are hovering on and get hour-by-hour data. You can also tap on the information icon in the top-right corner of the graph to read Apple’s in-depth explanation of what each stage of sleep means.

These new sleep features are excellent, and I appreciate that Apple is making the granular data readily available in every graph in the Sleep section of Health. Alas, as I must continue to complain each year, Apple’s Sleep feature only works if you set up a sleep schedule. That said, this year I dug into that requirement and mostly managed to circumvent it in a way that wasn’t too bothersome.

In the sleep schedule setup screen in the Health app for iOS, I disabled the ‘Use Schedule for Sleep Focus’ setting, which stops the schedule from automatically enabling a Focus mode. I also disabled the ‘Wind Down’ feature (by setting it to zero minutes) which tries to tell me that it’s time to go to sleep some amount of time before the schedule triggers. Finally, I disabled the Sleep Reminders settings. I then set up a schedule that is relatively close to the hours that I am often asleep.

Ultimately though, with all of the annoying reminder and Focus features disabled, the sleep schedule doesn’t really do much of anything — which is exactly what I want since I rarely sleep on a set schedule. With these settings, I get to control Sleep entirely. I just quickly enable the Sleep Focus from Control Center on my Apple Watch when I am actually going to sleep. This is never hard to remember, because the Sleep Focus also turns off the always-on watch face, which I definitely need to be off if I am sleeping with my Apple Watch on.

This combination of settings has removed my main gripes with Sleep requiring a schedule to be set up. That said, I’ve learned that I still just dislike sleeping with a watch on, so I only kept up with the sleep tracking for a few weeks while preparing this review.

One confusing thing I’ve noticed is that Apple’s ‘time in bed’ metric has some sort of very strange 9-hour default going on. Almost every night when I don’t wear my Apple Watch to sleep, the next day my Sleep recap shows me as having been “in bed” between exactly 1:30 AM and 10:30 AM. These time periods do not pertain to the sleep schedule that I have set up, as that schedule is set from 3:00 AM to 10:30 AM.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it may just be related to my strange setup. I’ve been running two iPhones during the beta process, with one on iOS 16 and another still on iOS 15. Still, the Sleep settings are identical for both, so I’m not sure why that would cause this strange in-bed data. It could always be a beta bug, but it has persisted intermittently all the way up to the final beta release. Hopefully this issue is only on my end, and most Sleep users won’t see similar bad data reflected in their results. (The actual sleep tracking metrics have always been accurate to my real-life sleeping hours, so the in-bed metric being off hasn’t felt like that big of a deal.)

AFib History

A new AFib history feature in watchOS 9 can estimate how frequently a heart is in AFib for users diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. It will also track lifestyle factors that may influence these users’ condition. This data is accessible via the Health app on iOS in yet another app-within-an-app interface. The data can also be surfaced by helpful notifications on the Apple Watch.

AFib history displays your heart data on a graph, and can export all data into PDF format for you to easily take for review by your doctor.

Watch Faces

From left: the new Metropolitan, Playtime, Lunar, and Astronomy watch faces in watchOS 9. Source: Apple.

As always, Apple has some new watch faces for us. Also as always, most of them are extremely niche or novelty faces. There is one new option this year which may be a legitimate contender for your watch face, though.

Metropolitan

The Metropolitan face may be my favorite new face of the last few years. It features four complications — one on each corner — and a very clean central dial. When you spin the Digital Crown, the numerals either stretch or squish in a fun effect to fidget with. Four is a decent number of complications, and the face has some very nice customization options for the dial and background colors, allowing you to design some very interesting faces via color combinations.

Metropolitan still isn’t going to pull me off of my long-running favorite Infograph watch face, as I don’t want to miss out on the nice central complications. For users who care less about complications than I do though, this is a really nice watch face option that is well worth your consideration.

Playtime

Playtime is another of Apple’s strange novelty faces. It shows the time as four ballon-like characters with eyes and feet. In the background is some confetti. You can spin the Digital Crown to twirl the confetti, and you can tap the screen to “bump” the balloons. They will be playfully nudged around for a bit before coming back to their main positions. If you tap fast enough for a long time, generally using two fingers, you can get the balloons agitated enough that they will occasionally do a full backflip or spin all the way around.

This watch face looks like it was a very fun exercise for Chicago-based designer Joi Fulton. As an official watch face on the Apple Watch though, I have no idea why it exists. At first glance it looks like it would be entertaining to kids at least, but the interactivity is honestly underwhelming to degree that I think even kids would get bored quickly. It takes far too much tapping to make the balloons do anything particularly interesting, and even then all you get is a slow flip before they return to position. Maybe if furious tapping caused the balloons to go absolutely crazy, or if spinning the Digital Crown did something better than mildly rotating the background noise, then this face could at least be fun.

Lunar

The Lunar watch face is pretty straightforward. It celebrates the Lunar calendar by placing it on your watch face, and it includes support for the Chinese, Hebrew, and Islamic calendars. You can spin the Digital Crown to rotate through the lunar dates.

This watch face does have four corner complications, but overall it’s extremely busy. If you need to check in on the Lunar calendar frequently then I suppose this is the face you’ve been waiting for. Otherwise, it’s just another novelty face.

Astronomy

The best I can say about the Astronomy watch face is that it sent me down a mildly entertaining research rabbit hole trying to find out how many years I’d need to go backwards or forwards in time to see all eight of the little planet icons line up perfectly with each other. (Sadly, this apparently never happens.)

This watch face has three different views: Earth, Moon, and Solar System. Each view shows an up-close depiction of its subject layered behind the digital time, and includes a complication at the top and another at the bottom. If you spin the Digital Crown, you’ll see each view zoom out so that you can see the entire subject. Continuing to spin the Crown will take you backwards or forwards by hours or days at a time. The Earth view will show the sunlight rotating around the planet throughout each day, the Moon view will show the phase of the moon, and the Solar System view will show the rotation of the planets around the Sun.

My teasing aside, this face does look really nice. If you’re really into astronomy then it’s probably exactly the kind of watch face that you’ll love. Outside of that niche though, I doubt it has much staying power.

First-Party Apps

While the only brand-new first-party app this year is Medications, Apple also has some updates to existing apps ready for watchOS 9.

Calendar

The watchOS Calendar app can now be zoomed out to week or month views, rather than only displaying single day views. Just spin the Digital Crown to swipe to scroll up and down between weeks or months. Tap to drill down to the day view, which has been updated with a new hovering ‘…’ button. You can tap the button to access a menu of options, with a ‘New Event’ button at the top and a list of view options beneath it.

The view options aren’t new, but they were previously only accessible from the Calendar panel in the watchOS settings app. Bringing those to the app itself should make them a lot more accessible, which is good since I think the ‘List’ view (which now appears to the be default) is a lot better than the previous default ‘Up Next’ view. In the List view, only events show up, so you no longer have to swipe through empty days just to get to the next day with an event.

The ability to create events within the Calendar app is new this year, and it’s great to see Apple build out this core app with such a necessary feature. You can configure new events with titles, locations, start and end date and times, repeats, and more. Essentially every feature of Calendar events from iOS can now be configured in watchOS.

When configuring an event’s location, you have options to use the locations you’re currently at, or to type in a search term. The search option will display a list of results from Maps, so you can search for and add locations by name, which is a nice option.

If you tap into an event with a location, you can tap on the location to open it in the Maps app for Apple Watch, and then activate navigation directions to the location from there.

The updates to Calendar are excellent, especially in the age of the full-size keyboard for Series 7 Apple Watches and later. With text input becoming more accessible, as well as with modern Apple Watches being less connected to iPhones, it’s vital for Apple to start empowering the operating system to do more.

The one miss here is that, while you can add new calendar events, you can’t edit them once they exist. This feels like an oversight, since the entire interface to edit them is already there. I hope Apple adds this feature in a dot update.

Reminders

Reminders has also been updated with the ability to edit existing reminders. Just tap on a reminder to open a menu with an option to edit it. Tapping the ‘Edit’ button will bring you to a new interface in the app, from which you can change the reminder’s title, notes, due date/time, and more.

Oddly enough, the interface for adding a reminder, which was already present and allowed adding them with only a name, has not changed. So you can only create reminders with a name, but then you can find the created reminder and edit it to have all of the details that you’d like.

This whole thing is very strange, as Calendar allows creating with full details but no editing, while Reminders allows editing with full details but only extremely basic creation. These two apps combined would have all the features that we want from them.

Regardless of the oversimple creation flow, it’s great that we finally have some avenue to set up more complicated reminders from the wrist. Siri still works too, but the new editing interface makes even more features available.

Podcasts

Finally, the Podcasts app has been updated to go fully independent from the iPhone in watchOS 9. The new version allows you to search for, follow, and unfollow new shows directly from your Apple Watch. Selecting particular episodes to download is also supported, and the new Listen Now section will make suggestions for new shows you might like to listen to.

With Apple pushing harder on its Family Setup feature this year, these improvements to Podcasts make a lot of sense. Family Setup allows kids to be given Apple Watches without requiring a paired iPhone, and now they’ll have access to their favorite shows from the first-party Podcasts app for the first time.

Banner Notifications

Left: watchOS 8 pop-up notification. Center: watchOS 9 banner notification. Right: expanded banner notification.

This year’s new system feature is the debut of drop-down banner notifications. When you’re actively using your Apple Watch in watchOS 9 and a notification comes in, it will slide down as a small banner from the top of the screen, rather than taking over as a full-screen notification.

This is a huge improvement over the old setup, and it has actively made the experience of using my Apple Watch more convenient and comfortable. Full-screen notifications popping up while you’re trying to do something else makes the whole device feel more like a notification machine than an actual computer on your wrist. With banner notifications, Apple is giving control back to the user to determine whether or not the incoming notification is more important than their current task.

The implementation of this feature is perfect. While you have your wrist raised, notifications come in as banners. You can easily swipe up on them to dismiss the banner if you don’t want to deal with it, or tap it to expand to the usual full-screen view. However, when your wrist is not raised and a notification comes in, it will show up in its normal full-screen form immediately when you raise your wrist. In practice, this has been exactly the behavior that I want every single time.

Miscellany

Low Power Mode is now available on watchOS, and can be activated by opening Control Center and tapping the battery percentage icon. The new mode will preserve battery life by disabling certain features such as the always-on display — a far nicer alternative to Power Reserve mode.

The Compass app has been updated in watchOS 9 to support waypoints and a new Backtrack feature. While available on the Apple Watch Series 4 and later, most of the new Compass features require an Apple Watch Series 6, so I wasn’t able to test them out. MacRumors has more details.

The Portrait watch face now supports photos of dogs and cats.

The special Nike watch faces which used to only be available if you purchased a Nike-branded Apple Watch are now available to all Apple Watch users.

Apple Watches configured as independent devices by Family Setup can now be given access to HomeKit-enabled devices, allowing these users to control lights, lock and unlock doors, and more right from their wrist.

The Siri UI in watchOS 9 now overlays the small Siri bubble on top of other watchOS content, rather than immediately initiating a full-screen UI change.

The full-size keyboard on the Apple Watch Series 7 now supports more languages.

The wobble interface for adding or removing items in watchOS Control Center now shows text labels, making for a convenient way to remember what all of the icons actually do.

Conclusion

Recently, I’ve found my excitement for the future of watchOS rekindling. The Apple Watch hardware is far stronger than it was in the early days, from larger screens to far more powerful processors. Will improved text input via the full-size keyboard pave the way for a new evolution of the Friends interface, or some other unique modicum of communication2? Will Glances return and gain interactivity now that the Apple Watch could actually handle third-party apps operating from the watch face3?

Obviously we can’t answer those questions yet, but in the last couple years we’ve seen Apple bring back colorful iMacs, ports (ports!) on the MacBook Pro, Clarus the Dogcow, and more. In many ways it has felt like a loosening up of the strict professionalism that we saw from Apple throughout the 2010s. Perhaps they’ll point some of that new energy at watchOS in the coming years as well. I want Apple to make watchOS weird again.

I want Apple to make watchOS weird again.

Maybe I’m reading too much into a sample size of one, but I think watchOS 9 may already show signs of new life in this area. Banner notifications make watchOS feel like a software platform again rather than a high-end Fitbit. The ability to create and edit calendar events and reminders, and to discover and follow new podcasts, aid in this vibe shift as well. I hope we continue to see more features like these in the coming years.

While OS-level advancements are always going to be my personal favorites, there’s no argument that the health and fitness features of Apple Watch will always be of more importance. In these areas, Apple is saving and improving lives by bringing more and more advancements to personal healthcare and healthy living. In watchOS 9, Apple hit it out of the park here.

The improvements to the Workout app are excellent, and arrived with a surprising level of sophistication for brand-new watchOS features. The same can be said of the Medications feature, which I think will be enormously popular (although they really need to make those notifications sticky). I’m pleased to see sleep tracking growing more in-depth too, especially since the new data points don’t require new hardware.

On the watch face front, Apple continues to drain what is clearly a significant amount of effort into new watch faces every year, but they just keep creating weird novelty faces, or faces for extremely niche groups. If this is what Apple wants to do, I just don’t understand why they remain stoically unwilling to open up the device to third-party watch faces. Allow developers to fill in the gaps of actually good general-purpose watch faces, and I will immediately stop minding that Apple invests its limited focus into accurately depicting planetary rotations or collaborating with designers.

Watch faces are almost always bad though, so I can barely even bring myself to ding watchOS 9 on them at this point. Overall, I think I’m ready to call this one of the best Apple Watch updates in years. We saw great new features across the board, filled in some longstanding gaps in functionality, and finally dropped support for the Apple Watch Series 3. The last may seem like a minor footnote, but it actually should free up watchOS developers to make even better apps going forward now that they don’t need to support that very flawed, outdated hardware.

watchOS 9 was released this week, and is available for free to all users with Apple Watches Series 4 and above.

I imagine Digital Touch is unfazed by my mockery; likely too busy feeling satisfied that it is the only one of the features described above which has (somehow) endured into modern iterations of watchOS. ↩︎

Remember Walkie-Talkie? While only useful in niche situations, that was a legitimately cool new feature which felt perfect for the Apple Watch. I want to see Apple try out more weird ideas like that. ↩︎

Apple removed Glances from watchOS while the Apple Watch Series 3 was still a top-of-the-line device, rather than a relic whose end of life was recently celebrated by developers. The idea of having customizable third-party mini-interfaces available via swipes directly on the watch face was always a great one, but the hardware back then just couldn't handle it. ↩︎