Interactivity

The Apple Watch is arguably the most active piece of hardware you own because it measures your vitals so often. It’s also the one you probably interact with least, and when you do, it’s only for short bursts of time.

As such, the Apple Watch needs to surface information promptly and make interactions quick and easy. Apple has refined watchOS’ approach to this constantly since the Apple Watch debuted, but it’s been in the last two to three years – with additions like the Smart Stack, Live Activities, and the double tap gesture – that the system has made significant advancements.

Health features lead the way in every Apple Watch update, but the progressions in interactivity show no signs of slowing down.

Smart Stack

The Smart Stack continues to receive the most attention of all the Apple Watch’s non-health interactions. The addition of Live Activities was a big step forward last year, and it led me to reach for my iPhone a lot less to check on food deliveries, Citymapper routes, and sports scores. They were all just a wrist-turn away on my watch.

Now, the Smart Stack is gaining even more utility in the form of Smart Stack hints, which appear as small icons at the bottom of your watch face. Though they might seem totally new, they’re really an evolution of widget suggestions. Using a new on-device relevancy algorithm, watchOS leverages data such as location, date, time, sleep schedule, and more to enable the Smart Stack to make more ephemeral widget suggestions. The icon itself is merely, as the name suggests, a hint to the user that a widget suggestion has been added. You still need to tap on the hint or open the Smart Stack to view the widget; alternatively, you can swipe down to dismiss it.

The easiest way to check this feature out is by triggering the Camera Remote hint. When you open the native Camera app on your iPhone, a small camera icon will appear at the bottom of your watch face. Tap it, and the Smart Stack will open, revealing a widget for opening the Camera Remote app.

Other Smart Stack hints include activating Do Not Disturb when a meeting is detected in your calendar and starting a frequently used workout type when you arrive at your gym. And third-party app developers can even leverage this new algorithm to create their own hints. Imagine being prompted to start a timer in Timery at the beginning of a meeting, or to start a stretching routine in Bend at bedtime. This feature has a lot of potential.

While the ability to quickly launch Camera Remote when setting up a big family picture is beneficial to me, after an initial flurry of hints early on in the beta period, they largely stopped appearing on my watch. I have no idea why this could be, and I may be just missing them. But perhaps this is a sign that the feature isn’t as effective as it could be.

Smart Stack hints are subtle and appear silently on your Apple Watch without any notification or haptic feedback. Given how deeply you can customize widget suggestions, I’d like to see the option to enable haptic feedback to prompt me to check out a hint. If that were possible, I might notice Smart Stack hints more often than I currently do.

Additionally, it strikes me that it would be more efficient to let the hint icon actually launch its own app in some cases. For instance, when interacting with the Camera Control hint, I still have to tap again on the widget in the Smart Stack to open the app. If I’m tapping on the hint in the first place, I obviously want to launch Camera Control. Being able to do so with just one tap would be a welcome reduction in friction.

One other change to the Smart Stack is the ability to configure widgets. This is essentially identical to the existing option to configure a single, solitary widget in the Smart Stack with three complications of your choosing. Any app can now offer these configurable widgets, allowing users to customize them with any complication-style data or action relevant to them. watchOS 26 itself already provides a configurable widget for the Weather app, and I hope to see many developers do the same with their apps. After all, this means that apps don’t have to offer endless variations of widgets; they can offer up just one and let users decide what to show side by side.

Control Center

Development of Control Center has remained stagnant for eight years now, but this year sees the feature’s first meaningful enhancement. It has long been the place for single-action buttons. You can toggle Wi-Fi on and off, activate a sound on your iPhone to help you find it, turn the screen into a flashlight, and more. But these have always been basic system controls.

Now, in watchOS 26, you can add more controls for built-in apps to Control Center, as well as – crucially – third-party controls. Any Apple Watch app can offer controls to interact with or control the app. You can also add many single-action controls that make their way over from Control Center on the iPhone.

The types of controls you can add to Control Center fall into three categories:

1. Launching a watchOS app, optionally to a specific place in the app.
2. Triggering a specific action within a watchOS app – for instance, starting a HomeKit scene or kicking off a shortcut.
3. Triggering a control available on your iPhone, almost as if your watch is opening your iPhone and tapping the control in Control Center for you.

Triggering a HomeKit scene has proved particularly useful for me as I sit down to watch a movie. I have the control placed near the top of my Control Center, so when I’m about to start watching, I simply press the side button to bring up Control Center and tap it. It’s a straightforward two-tap process, and although it takes two or three seconds to activate (as HomeKit actions on the Apple Watch tend to do), I really love the convenience.

There are endless controls you can add for apps on your iPhone, and I found an excellent use for the ExpressVPN control, which allows me to activate the VPN on my iPhone directly from my wrist. Additionally, a new update to µBrowser enables me to launch directly into my bookmark for The Verge to take a glance at the day’s headlines without pulling my iPhone out of my pocket.

While it’s not the much-needed rethink Control Center deserves, these new capabilities do provide it with more utility, which I’m grateful for. They grant users much better access to actions that would typically take up space on the watch face as complications. The most obvious example is HomeKit scenes. Being able to trigger these directly from your watch is very convenient.

Gestures

I am a massive fan of the double tap gesture introduced with the Apple Watch Series 9, and I’ve been keenly waiting for Apple to expand on it with others. It may have taken two years to see another one, but the wrist flick gesture has been worth the wait.

The easiest way to explain the wrist flick gesture is that it acts like pressing the Digital Crown. That might sound simple, but the range of situations where this comes in handy is wide and varied. When a notification comes in, you can flick your wrist away from you to dismiss it. When you are in any app, you can flick your wrist to return to your app list or watch face (depending on where you were last). You can even open your Smart Stack using double tap, scroll through it with subsequent double taps, and then flick your wrist to return to the watch face. No tapping of the screen needed – just gestures.

Apple’s demonstration of this feature was quite limited: dismissing a notification or an alarm. But the better way to think of it is as a replacement for the many times you have to bring your opposite hand all the way over to your watch in order to press the Digital Crown or cover the screen. Honestly, this gesture has completely changed the way I interact with my Apple Watch. Although it took some time to adjust my muscle memory, I now use wrist flick extensively.

I would love for Apple to enable this gesture to do more, like bringing down Notification Center from the watch face. Still, for now, it’s a great example of the innovative thinking that goes into the watchOS platform with real benefit for everyday users.