watchOS 3: The MacStories Review

This month will mark the two-year point since the Apple Watch was first unveiled to the world, and nearly a year and a half since the product first made its way into the hands of consumers. Two years is a long time in technology in general, but particularly so for Apple. In this time the Apple Watch has gone from a product developed in secret, deep within Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, to the most popular smartwatch in the world. Millions of units have been sold, and surveys have pegged customer sat as extremely high.

Yet despite these positives, the Apple Watch has spent its first two years of existence as a flawed product. This is not due to the Watch’s hardware, which was beautifully designed, decently powered, and boasts enough battery life to easily last a day. Rather, the Achilles’ heel of the Apple Watch has been its software.

watchOS has had problems from the start. Apple shipped its first version in an incomplete state, in which third-party applications were purportedly supported, but unable to run natively on the Watch itself. Instead, the logic of each app was executed on the connected iPhone, and the Watch was used as a dumb display for the results. This method was astoundingly slow in practice, not to mention that it rendered the Watch incapable of nearly anything beyond telling the time when disconnected from its iPhone.

It’s not surprising then, that only two months after the Watch’s release to consumers in April 2015, Apple introduced the first iteration on its operating system, watchOS 2. As I discussed in my review of watchOS 2 last year, version 2 did not significantly change any visual designs or interfaces. Rather, it was a foundational update meant to create the base of a more mature operating system, establishing important building blocks that could be iterated upon in the future.

The foundation created by watchOS 2 seems to be paying off, as this year’s major update to the system, watchOS 3, does indeed build up from that base. However, many of the other aspects of watchOS 2 turned out to be failures, and a year in the wild has proved the update unable to fulfill many of the promises Apple made about it.

There were two standout watchOS 2 features which did not hold true. First, the data surfaced by watchOS 2 apps was supposed to be updated more frequently in the background so as to keep them consistently relevant. Second, the move from running app logic on the iPhone to running it on the Watch itself was supposed to make watchOS apps more responsive and fast.

Perhaps when compared to the incomplete and unacceptable performance of watchOS 1, it could be argued that these goals succeeded, but I would disagree. After a year of using watchOS 2 with my Apple Watch strapped to my wrist nearly every single day, I can say unequivocally that apps were not fast enough to cross the threshold of “useable”, nor was data ever updated consistently enough for me to trust that it was not stale.

In lieu of these and other letdowns in watchOS 2, and after over a year of Apple Watches being in consumers’ hands, the next update to Apple’s smartwatch operating system had a lot riding on its shoulders. Would it double down on the sins of its predecessors, adding more interfaces like the spinning circles of friends and the whimsical yet impractical honeycomb Home screen? Would Apple try even harder to achieve the impossible goal (for current hardware, at least) of all apps running as smoothly as iOS apps and updating consistently?

Thankfully, while the rest of us spent the last year debating Apple’s intentions, Apple spent it hard at work.

For this year’s update, Apple took a hard look at the state of its smartwatch operating system, and it found many features wanting. Showing an uplifting ability to admit when they were wrong, Apple did not shy away from tearing out anything that wasn’t working, including features that were emphasized and promoted in announcements and marketing just last year.

watchOS 3’s changes have cut deeply and ruthlessly at its origins.

watchOS 3 is still the same watchOS that you know, but its changes have cut deeply and ruthlessly at its origins. Apple is stripping away the cruft and honing watchOS down to a purer form. The strong system foundation of watchOS 2 and general design language of watchOS 1 are still present, but this year’s improvements have made both far more effective.

Table of Contents

Interface

The Dock and the Side Button

Emergency SOS

Demotion of Time Travel

Demotion of the Home Screen

Promotion of Complications

Watch Faces

Control Center

Unlock your Mac

Notifications and Scribble

Apps

Reminders

Timer

Breathe

Home

Heart Rate

Find My Friends

Watch for iPhone

Activity

Activity Sharing

Wheelchair Users

System

Background Tasks

Native Events

Native Digital Crown Access

Native Touch/Gesture Access

Real-Time Heart Rate and Motion Data

System Frameworks

SceneKit and SpriteKit

CloudKit

AVFoundation and Core Audio

GameKit

HomeKit

Inline Video and Apple Pay

Conclusion

Interface

The Dock and the Side Button

Emergency SOS

Demotion of Time Travel

Demotion of the Home Screen

Promotion of Complications

Watch Faces

Control Center

Unlock your Mac

Notifications and Scribble

Apps

Reminders

Timer

Breathe

Home

Heart Rate

Find My Friends

Watch for iPhone

Activity

Activity Sharing

Wheelchair Users

System

Background Tasks

Native Events

Native Digital Crown Access

Native Touch/Gesture Access

Real-Time Heart Rate and Motion Data

System Frameworks

SceneKit and SpriteKit

CloudKit

AVFoundation and Core Audio

GameKit

HomeKit

Inline Video and Apple Pay

Conclusion

Interface

The Dock and the Side Button

Emergency SOS

Demotion of Time Travel

Demotion of the Home Screen

Promotion of Complications

Watch Faces

Control Center

Unlock your Mac

Notifications and Scribble

Apps

Reminders

Timer

Breathe

Home

Heart Rate

Find My Friends

Watch for iPhone

Activity

Activity Sharing

Wheelchair Users

System

Background Tasks

Native Events

Native Digital Crown Access

Native Touch/Gesture Access

Real-Time Heart Rate and Motion Data

System Frameworks

SceneKit and SpriteKit

CloudKit

AVFoundation and Core Audio

GameKit

HomeKit

Inline Video and Apple Pay

Conclusion

Interface

The Dock and the Side Button

Emergency SOS

Demotion of Time Travel

Demotion of the Home Screen

Promotion of Complications

Watch Faces

Control Center

Unlock your Mac

Notifications and Scribble

Apps

Reminders

Timer

Breathe

Home

Heart Rate

Find My Friends

Watch for iPhone

Activity

Activity Sharing

Wheelchair Users

System

Background Tasks

Native Events

Native Digital Crown Access

Native Touch/Gesture Access

Real-Time Heart Rate and Motion Data

System Frameworks

SceneKit and SpriteKit

CloudKit

AVFoundation and Core Audio

GameKit

HomeKit

Inline Video and Apple Pay

Conclusion

Interface

The Dock and the Side Button

Emergency SOS

Demotion of Time Travel

Demotion of the Home Screen

Promotion of Complications

Watch Faces

Control Center

Unlock your Mac

Notifications and Scribble

Apps

Reminders

Timer

Breathe

Home

Heart Rate

Find My Friends

Watch for iPhone

Activity

Activity Sharing

Wheelchair Users

System

Background Tasks

Native Events

Native Digital Crown Access

Native Touch/Gesture Access

Real-Time Heart Rate and Motion Data

System Frameworks

SceneKit and SpriteKit

CloudKit

AVFoundation and Core Audio

GameKit

HomeKit

Inline Video and Apple Pay

Conclusion

Interface

The biggest flaws in watchOS 2 and earlier were speed-related, but interface design was clearly the runner up. While the watch face itself is a pretty solid aspect of the Apple Watch, many of the UI choices around it in watchOS 2 had problems. Standouts were the Friends interface that was tied to a physical button despite no one ever using it, the Glances interface that was slow and cumbersome to navigate, and the honeycomb Home screen that made finding specific apps a nightmare.

The problems inherent in all of these interfaces left Apple Watch users in an odd place leading up to the watchOS 3 announcement. Rather than feeling excited for new features, as is the norm for Apple’s other OSes, many hoped that Apple would deviate from their typical forward march, and instead provide a rethinking of some of the basics.

When building iOS, Apple did a remarkable job of starting with a system that got the basics almost completely right. In the last ten years of iOS, they have built upon their original idea and expanded the system massively, but I can’t think of any major system interface feature that they ever had to double back on and completely change. iOS’ interface has evolved for sure, both in design and capabilities, but the Home screen still exists just as it always has (and it is still tied to the Home button, like it’s always been). The dock is still the same, too, as is the entire paradigm of apps, albeit expanded greatly in scope. So much of the original iOS (iPhone OS back then) was made so well.

The same cannot be said of the original watchOS interface.

watchOS 1 and 2 did get some things right. As mentioned above, I have no complaints about the watch face itself. I think Complications are great, well-thought-out, and nicely implemented. I would say the same for the notification UI, and Notification Center itself. Apple Pay and Siri too were both well placed for easy and frictionless access.

However, for all that Apple got right with watchOS 1 and 2, there was just as much they got wrong. The Home screen interface was difficult to organize, parse, and interact with. The Friends interface did not reflect a real-world frequent use case for the Apple Watch, yet it was assigned to one of only two physical buttons on the device. The lack of interactivity for Glances hamstrung their usefulness (except for the special ones from Apple, which were in fact very useful), and every Glance being full screen made it difficult to maintain your bearings within the interface.

Fortunately, it’s not just users who have taken note of the Apple Watch’s interface issues. Apple has spent the last year creating new solutions to the unique design needs of these tiny smartwatch screens. While watchOS 2 reserved its biggest changes for under-the-hood improvements (such as the WatchConnectivity framework, NSURLSession, and the introduction of native third-party apps), watchOS 3 shifts focus onto a rethinking of the essentials.

This year’s update may bring plenty of improvements to the underlying system as well, but it is the sweeping interface changes which will stand out most starkly to current users.

The Dock and the Side Button

The biggest change to the Apple Watch interface in watchOS 3 is the reassignment of one of the only two physical buttons on the device. In the annals of Apple design history, it’s certainly a rarity to see a physical button assigned to an entirely different software feature 1. Yes, gone is the Friends interface, which has in fact been removed entirely from watchOS, not just moved someplace else. In its place is a new UI element which has been assigned a classic name familiar to Apple’s other operating systems: the Dock.

While the Apple Watch Dock may have a familiar name, it is very much a reimagining of the concept of a dock from iOS or macOS. On watchOS, the Dock is far more analogous to the watchOS 1 and 2 Glances view. With watchOS 3, the old Glances view is gone, replaced entirely by the Dock, and now tied to the Side Button rather than an upward swipe from the watch face.

Similar to Glances, the Dock is comprised of a horizontal-scrolling list of separate interfaces from the apps that have been assigned to it. Rather than each interface taking up the entire screen, though, they now are zoomed back slightly, revealing glimpses of the edges of the apps placed on either side. Above the snapshot for the app being viewed is its name, and below it is a row of dots, one for each docked app. The dot for the app that is currently centered is highlighted in white, while the rest appear grey.

Swiping anywhere on the surface of the app snapshots will move amongst the list, but now you can also swipe across the row of dots to rapidly move to a new position in the lineup. If you’d rather navigate the list without covering the screen with your finger, spinning the Digital Crown back and forth will slide the interface between apps as well.

One of the main problems with the Glances view in WatchOS 2 was how difficult it was to maintain your bearings within the interface. If I ever added more than three or four Glances, I often found it difficult to remember which direction I needed to swipe in order to get to the next Glance I wanted. Furthermore, swiping could only move one or two Glances at a time, so getting from one side of the interface to another was too slow and took too many swipes. The Dock’s design in watchOS 3 greatly improves upon both of these problems while still maintaining the advantages of the Glances interface, mainly that taking up most of the screen is important for apps to be able to show information legibly on the tiny display.

In the weeks I’ve been using watchOS 3, I’ve found that I enjoy navigating the Dock interface. I have almost always found the Dock to be instantly responsive to my touch (another sin of the old Glances view was that it always felt sluggish and unresponsive), and something about sliding between the miniature snapshots of Watch apps captures that feeling of fun and whimsy which Apple is famous for. It’s certainly similar to the whimsy of swiping around on the Watch’s honeycomb Home screen, but that experience is always accompanied by the frustration of trying to tap on any of those tiny bubbles. The Apple Watch Dock is both whimsical and functional. It is an interface done right, and I’m very happy to see the OS moving in that direction after too many stumbles in watchOS 1 and 2.

While design-wise the Dock may look like the same old Glances view with a few tweaks and improvements, it holds a far more impactful meaning for the apps within it. The Dock can hold a maximum of 10 apps, plus one extra “recent” slot, which will go to your most recently used app that is not already docked. For apps placed in the Dock, watchOS will do everything it can to make sure that the information in their snapshots is as fresh as possible anytime you want to look.

watchOS 2 attempted a similar goal, but for every app on the whole system. The end result was that all apps suffered from a lack of system resources. With watchOS 3, Apple is taking a more conservative approach. It no longer attempts to keep every app updated, instead focusing only on the small subset of ten (max) apps in the Dock and whichever apps are behind any active Complications.

With this in mind, choose carefully when selecting apps for your Dock. The ones you pick are going to receive special privileges, so make sure they’re the apps that you use most often. If you can’t think of ten different apps that you need, my advice is to just leave slots open. If you keep even less than ten docked apps, the resources that would have been divvied out to the empty slots should now be redistributed to the others.

In watchOS 1 and 2, the Glances view was made up of separate interfaces that were optionally built by watchOS developers, called Glances. If a developer did not go through the process of creating a Glance, then their app would not show up as an option to be added to the Glances view. In the watchOS 2 design guidelines, Apple described Glances as interfaces which should not require any user interaction, but simply display the data that a user would be looking for from an app if they simply wanted to “glance” at it. This is why Glances were not afforded any method of receiving user input, but instead just launched the app in question if they were tapped anywhere.

All that has changed for docked apps in watchOS 3. The Dock view does not contain specific interfaces which need to be built explicitly by developers to make their apps eligible for placement. Rather, it simply shows a snapshot of each app, suspended in whichever state they were last left in. As you scroll through the Dock, the Watch will fire up apps which you linger on, so they will actually be running live in the shrunken-back Dock view. Tapping the app then simply zooms you into it. If the app was in memory, this will be a seamless transition. If it was not, a loading animation will temporarily overtake the screen until it is ready (when this does happen, it generally takes far less time than it did in watchOS 2).

In another nice touch, if you press the side button on the Apple Watch while a docked app is open, the interface will zoom back and you will find yourself located at that app’s position in the Dock. Tapping the side button from an app that is not in the Dock will still zoom back, but you’ll be at the very last location in your Dock, the “recent” slot. When you linger on that slot, you’ll see a “Keep in Dock” button slide up, and tapping it will give the app a permanent position in the Dock (assuming you have room).

If you don’t have an open slot then the button will be greyed out, but you can open a space quite easily by sliding over to an app that you’d like to swap out and swiping up on its snapshot. This will reveal a large “Remove” button, which will pop the app out of your Dock and discontinue its special Dock privileges.

Docked apps can be reordered quite easily on the Watch. Simply tap and hold on an app’s snapshot to activate the reordering interface, then slide the app to one side or the other to move it around. This is also a convenient way of counting the number of docked apps you have at any given time, because when you tap and hold on an app it displays the position of the app within the total number of apps in your Dock.

With all that said, the most interesting aspect of the Dock is not its design, nor even the added privileges that docked apps are imbued with. Rather, it’s the story that the interface tells about Apple’s new outlook on the Apple Watch.

In watchOS 1 and 2, it was clear that Apple intended the Apple Watch to be a huge platform for communication and interaction. They believed users would be initiating conversations from their Apple Watches, and moving around between many different apps throughout the day. Their emphasis on the honeycomb Home screen in marketing materials and on stage showed their expectation that this interface was going to be used frequently. Another aspect that they pushed hard on was Force Touch, showing their high hopes for what was at the time their newest mechanism for interaction on any of their devices.

As of watchOS 3, these intentions are either gone entirely or greatly decreased throughout their announcements, marketing, and the system as a whole. Force Touch gestures have been reduced in number; the Home screen was never once mentioned or shown during the WWDC keynote.

Above all else though, the Dock is the greatest indicator of the shift that Apple is making here. By replacing the Friends view with an evolution of the Glances view, watchOS 3 is quietly letting go of the delusions of operating system grandeur held by its ancestors. No longer is initiation of conversations emphasized, nor even navigating the system itself. Instead, glanceable information and quick access to only a small subset of apps is featured more prominently than anything else.

watchOS 3 is quietly letting go of the delusions of operating system grandeur held by its ancestors.

Apple isn’t just making this shift with the watchOS system interfaces. They’re also subtly pushing it on third-party developers. The fact that the Dock spells the end of the separate interface known as a “Glance”, and yet still is supposed to be a method of quickly gathering information from apps, is a gentle push for watchOS developers to make their UIs glanceable. There is no longer a distinction between the part of an app that is glanced at and the functioning app itself.

Few of these changes will come as a surprise to Apple Watch users. I’m truly not sure how Apple got this wrong in the first place, because it was evident to me from the first day I put on my Apple Watch that the great majority of its value lay in quick access to information and very brief interactions. Whether it’s notifications, the current weather, or pausing or skipping a song, the Apple Watch is at its best when only being used for brief intervals. Perhaps Apple was caught up in its own reality distortion field while building the system in secret deep within their campus, but the interface of watchOS 1 and 2 did not reflect the way the device would be used by the masses.

With watchOS 3, Apple has set course in a new direction rather than stubbornly maintaining the old one. Perhaps this has something to do with Tim Cook’s intense focus on R&D…or maybe they just took a little longer to see what the rest of us found obvious. Regardless, the Apple Watch is better for these changes, and the Dock is leading the way to this new and superior watchOS.

Emergency SOS

The Dock isn’t the only new feature tied to the Apple Watch side button. There’s also another notable addition: Emergency SOS. This feature is activated by holding down the side button for 10 or more seconds, and its function is to call emergency services in your area.

Since your Apple Watch knows where you are, and also knows the emergency numbers for every major country or region, the Emergency SOS feature will work even if you need help in a foreign place where you might not know who to call. When you activate Emergency SOS, your emergency contacts (which you can add in the Watch app for iOS) will be notified of your call for help via text message, and these messages will include your current location as well.

Holding down the side button for only two seconds is tied to a screen with options to power your Apple Watch off, access your Medical ID, or call emergency services by swiping across the option at the bottom. The Emergency SOS feature ties the emergency services button to the continued holding-down of the side button after this screen shows up.

If you’re like me, the first thing you’re thinking is “am I going to set this off by accident?” Well, I took the risk and tested it out for you. Holding down the side button for the first couple seconds will bring up the aforementioned page of options. Continue to hold it after this and the Apple Watch will begin to buzz violently, as a countdown starting at 3 shows up on top of the Emergency SOS button on the screen. What I did not expect to happen next in the coffee shop I was testing this in was the maximum volume siren blare that the speaker emits during second 2 of the countdown.

So no, you’re not going to end up accidentally calling emergency services. Furthermore, if your imagination regarding this feature involved surreptitiously notifying authorities if you ever end up in a bank robbery or hostage situation 2, you’ll probably want to rethink that. It seems Emergency SOS is targeted more at medical emergencies or physical injuries like car accidents, where alarm volume won’t be a problem, but having to interact with a tiny screen might be. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, just keep holding onto that side button and help will be on the way.

The last thing to note here, in case you’re worried about children or immature friends getting ahold of your Apple Watch and accidentally calling the cops from your phone number, is that a locked Apple Watch disables Emergency SOS auto-call. The screen will still show up with the Emergency SOS option that can be swiped to activate this anyway, but continuously holding the button won’t do it on its own. I think that’s as it should be.

Emergency SOS is, of course, a feature that we all hope to never need to use. When we need it, though, watchOS 3 makes access to emergency services easier than ever, and it works no matter where we might be in the world. I’m not sure about that siren blare, but accidentally calling the authorities is never great either, so I suppose it’s a decent compromise to make sure you know what you’re doing when you hold down the button.

If you’re really opposed to auto-call, you do have the option to disable it from the Watch app for iOS. In that case, you can still activate Emergency SOS by holding the side button and then swiping the option that will show up on the screen.

Demotion of Time Travel

As it turns out, the Friends interface is not the only once-vaunted watchOS feature that is getting the axe in watchOS 3. Time Travel was one of the marquee features of the watchOS 2 update, but it has now been (sort of) cut from the system as well.

Time Travel sounded like a great idea in theory: spin the Digital Crown while looking at the watch face to see any Complications on the screen either rewind or fast-forward to show time-shifted information. The feature seemed a natural fit for the Watch, and gave the Digital Crown a purpose on the watch face where it was previously dormant. In practice, I always found Time Travel to be useless at best, and bothersome at worst.

As I’ve discussed already, the Apple Watch’s biggest use case is seeing what’s going on now. It’s at its best when presenting immediate information for instant gratification. Spinning the Digital Crown to see what score a game was at several minutes ago, or what the weather is going to be in several hours sounds like a good idea in theory, but the interface was never as good as it sounded for this use case. Such data is better presented as a list of scores with time stamps, or a timeline that shows the highs and lows and a line graph throughout the day. Spinning the Crown was always imprecise and inefficient for getting that kind of information.

In the end, I only ever activated Time Travel for two reasons: to move the watch hands away so I could see the date which they inexplicably cover 3, or on accident. The former is now an unsolvable problem without Time Travel. When the hands are covering the date, you’re just going to have to find a different method of looking up the current date 4. The latter, activating Time Travel on accident, was always in incredible annoyance. This is because it physically moved the watch hands, changing the time that I was very likely trying to read before I hit the Crown on accident. That problem, at least, is no longer an issue in (default) watchOS 3.

Time Travel has not been removed completely from watchOS 3. Instead, it has been disabled by default. This, of course, is just as effective as completely removing it for the vast majority of users. Most previous Watch owners will just think the feature is gone, if they ever knew it existed at all. New users will only ever experience it if they stumble across the setting in the Watch app for iOS.

Specifically, Time Travel can be turned on and off in the Clock section of the iOS Watch app. I can only imagine that it still exists at all because Apple is hoping to think up new ideas for the now disgraced former headline feature. Perhaps they should look into the technology behind Hypertime watches.

Demotion of the Home Screen

As I mentioned briefly above, the watchOS Home screen seems to have received a demotion in importance in the new update. The Home screen was granted quite a bit of screen time in the original Apple Watch introduction and in the watchOS 2 announcement, but it was nowhere to be seen in the watchOS 3 keynote or marketing. This seems to be yet another sign of the new direction that Apple is taking in watchOS 3. No longer are a wide variety of apps being focused on, as they are in iOS and macOS, and even tvOS. Rather, the story of the Apple Watch is one of a small subset of frequently used apps.

It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that this is a temporary change due to constraints on the system. Since the Watch has proven incapable of properly keeping all apps up to date, Apple has chosen to stop featuring the existence of so many apps on the Watch at all.

Regardless, for the meantime, the Home screen has fallen from Apple’s favor. It has received no updates whatsoever in the new OS, and with the addition of the Dock, there is even less need than before to open or navigate the honeycomb interface. This is especially so because apps on the Home screen are not receiving the same special treatment as those in the Dock. As such, opening any of those apps is going to take just as excruciatingly long as it took to open any app in watchOS 2.

For watchOS 4, I hope Apple will choose to take the same harsh overview of the Apple Watch Home screen as it did for the Friends and Glances interfaces in watchOS 3. While it may be acceptable today, it’s unrealistic to think that the operating system will continue to only need ten or so predefined apps kept consistently in memory. There was a time when the iPhone only had a handful of apps as well, and the same for the Mac. Eventually, every operating system matures, and as it does its use cases expand rapidly. Be it next year or the year after that, eventually Apple Watch users are going to want to quickly access more than ten apps. I hope that when that time comes, Apple has figured out a better interface for finding, organizing, and opening apps than the current Home screen in watchOS 3.

Promotion of Complications

watchOS 3 has not been kind to many of the interfaces from watchOS 1 and 2, but one did manage to stand the test of a year in the mass market: Complications.

Complications, introduced in watchOS 2, are tiny interfaces only available in particular positions on certain watch faces. These interfaces display small bits of information from the app they belong to, and they’re updated frequently throughout the day.

With watchOS 3, the idea behind Complications and the general implementation is more or less unchanged. The Complication interfaces are still the same tiny size, and the data behind apps chosen as Complications is still updated more regularly than other apps.

In the new OS, however, it is not just the Complications that gets access to extra system resources, but the entirety of the associated apps. Similar to apps in the Dock, the apps behind any Complications living on a user’s active watch are kept in memory to the greatest extent possible.

This change has a lot of effects on which apps users might choose as Complications. In watchOS 2, the only real reason to place a complication on the watch face was to maintain quick access to the information that the Complication exposed. While this is absolutely a great feature, I personally only find a very limited set of data types to be actually useful in such a position. The weather is definitely a great one to have direct access to on a watch face, and the current date is nice as well. Beyond those two, though, I find I never really end up referring to information from other Complications that I’ve tried on my watch face. Instead, I dedicate any remaining slots to Complications that launch apps and don’t show any information themselves.

In watchOS 2, this was a somewhat useful practice for certain first-party apps that launched quickly, such as the Timer or Stopwatch app. For other apps, slow load times generally rendered the easy access from the watch face null anyway, so I never tapped on them. As of watchOS 3, however, this problem is greatly minimized.

Since the apps behind Complications in watchOS 3 are kept in memory (to the best of the OS’s abilities), that means they now launch significantly faster than they did in watchOS 2. This results in me feeling comfortable giving apps Complication slots that I previously would have avoided, because I know the app will launch quickly when I want to use it. For third-party developers, this means that now every app should have a Complication, even if it’s nothing more than the app’s icon, so it can be used as a launcher. The Dock is a great place to keep frequently used apps, and the nice new interface makes navigating it fairly quick and easy, but nothing beats the ease and convenience of accessing an app via a Complication.

With the special privileges of being kept in memory and updated more frequently, the limited slots in the Dock and for Complications are going to be a battleground for watch app developers. Apps that don’t make it into these slots will most likely be used very rarely, if ever, as they will be back to the poor performance that defined the watchOS 2 era.

Watch Faces

With the above in mind, there is a bit of relief for the limit on Dock and Complication slots. Firstly, certain watch faces which previously did not allow any Complications, now do. The most prominent of these is the Photos watch face, which allows two Complications, one above and one below the time. This strikes me as likely one of the most popular watch faces, so it’s good that people who use it no longer have to choose between the convenience and utility of Complications, and their preference for a watch face with their own photos on it. The Motion and Time Lapse watch faces have also added Complication slots in watchOS 3, but the Astronomy and Solar faces remain free of any customization (admittedly, Astronomy has its own special items taking up what would otherwise be Complication slots, so that face at least has an excuse).

watchOS 3 does have a bit of a saving grace for those who want to be able to access more Complications than will fit on their watch faces, be that zero or the maximum of five (on the Modular face). In watchOS 3, a new edge-to-edge swipe gesture will slide between the different watch faces that are set up on your watch. This is a far quicker and more fluid interaction than the previous method of switching watch faces, which required force pressing the watch face, swiping to the one you wanted, then tapping to access it (that interaction still exists if you want to use it, and is still the only way to edit your watch faces on the watch itself).

This new swipe gesture removes much of the friction associated with swapping between watch faces. With it, it makes sense to set up multiple different faces which you slide between on a frequent basis. According to Apple during the watchOS keynote presentation, many users did this already with the old method. With the new one, Apple is upgrading it to a main feature of the Apple Watch. Everyone is expected to be changing watch faces now.

In my own usage of watchOS 3, I’ve found a couple of main reasons to change watch faces. First is mode switching. Alongside my standard watch face, I have a watch face set up for activity, and a watch face for movie theaters. I switch over to the activity face for runs, walks, or other activity. It uses the Chronograph watch face, and has four Complications: Timer, Stopwatch (this one is actually a part of the Chronograph face), Alarm, and Activity.

My movie theater watch face is an idea I got from Twitter (I tried to dig up my original source but couldn’t find the right one, unfortunately). It uses the Modular watch face with nothing on it except for the time in red. The result is an extremely dark watch face, so if the watch lights up when I move my arm during the movie, the light emitted from it isn’t enough to be disruptive.

Different watch faces for changing modes is really not a new concept in watchOS 3 – the behavior was entirely possible and often utilized in watchOS 2 as well. watchOS 3 only makes it a bit easier and more natural. A concept that is more or less new in watchOS 3 is the idea of storing extra Complications on different watch faces adjacent to your main face.

This is also something that was technically possible in watchOS 2, but the steps to move from one watch face to another were far too many for it to really make sense. With watchOS 3, however, I keep a watch face on the left side of my main face which contains four different Complications, all of which are just launchers for various apps. Most of these apps are in my Dock too, but I find that oftentimes it’s even faster to just swipe to the second watch face and tap the app’s Complication than to navigate to it in my Dock and open it from there.

This may just be a preference on my part, but in general I just like the option to quickly launch apps from several different places. If I know that the Dock has been navigated far away from the app I want to launch, then opening it via the second watch face can be faster.

The duplication is of course not necessary – you could keep an entirely different set of apps in the Complications of another watch face than you do in your Dock. The only thing to note about that, though, is that only that apps on your active watch face will be kept in memory. You can still use Complications on another watch face as an extra set of launchers so that you never have to access the honeycomb Home screen interface, but don’t expect those apps to not have to load when you fire them up if you’ve just switched over to that watch face for the first time in a while. However, if the apps are also in your Dock, then they should be staying active based on their privileges from there, so launching them from the Complications will be much faster.

Besides adding Complications to old watch faces, Apple has also introduced several completely new watch faces in watchOS 3. There are now two watch faces specifically devoted to the Apple Watch activity circles: Activity Digital and Activity Analog. As you might expect, Activity Digital shows the time digitally, with the activity rings taking up about a third of the screen in the lower left. Activity Analog is a little more clever, integrating the activity rings directly into the center of the analog watch hands, within the clock circle. Both of these watch faces include a max of three Complications, with one in each upper corner and a third in the bottom center.

Along with the activity watch faces, there is also a Numerals watch face, which is extremely simple. Numerals shows the current in large text, with analog clock hands in the center (but no tick marks to give completely accurate time). The hour number can be customized to a variety of different styles, and the face includes a single Complication in the bottom left corner.

Finally, a new Minnie Mouse watch face joins the Mickey face that has existed since the original watchOS. As with Mickey, the face shows a circle of numbers with an animated Minnie Mouse in the center pointing at the current hour and minute. The Face includes three Complications in the same style as both activity faces, with two in the top corners and one in the bottom center.

Personally, none of the new watch faces are my style, and I’m a bit disappointed that they didn’t release any more. The activity faces are great for people who use their watches primarily for fitness purposes, but the new offerings aren’t particularly interesting for those of us who want wider variety in more normal watch face designs. Numerals is more or less an analog version of X-Large, and Minnie is of course just a duplicate Mickey (I’m surprised Minnie hasn’t been around since the beginning).

For now, I’m sticking with Utility, but I’m still not completely happy with it. I wish Apple would release watch faces as frequently as it releases watch bands, or just open the space up to third-party developers if they are not going to expand it very much themselves (it seems they’re holding back from this in favor of selling watch faces to brands). For the time being, we continue to wait for greater variety in watch face designs. Perhaps now that the designers have finished rethinking the general Watch interfaces they can settle back down and focus on new watch faces instead.

Control Center

With the Glances interface upgraded to the Dock and reassigned to the side button, Apple needed another feature to take the place of Glances for the upward swipe gesture on the watch face. For this, they chose to take a page from iOS’ book and assign the gesture to “Control Center”.

Control Center in watchOS 3 is a collection of large buttons which control a variety of system functionalities. Basically, it’s the same interface that used to be the leftmost Glance in watchOS 2. The very top of Control Center shows whether or not your iPhone is currently connected, and also quickly displays messages giving you system statuses when you tap on buttons within the interface. The top right button toggles Airplane mode on the watch, and when pressed the message at the top will read “Airplane Mode: On” (or Off). You can also tell whether the mode is on or off based on the color of the Airplane mode button, which will turn orange when it is on.

At the top left of Control Center is the Watch’s current battery percentage, and tapping on this percentage will bring up a larger interface which reads the same thing, but in larger text, and includes a graphical representation of the percentage out of a circle. At the bottom of this underwhelming battery “details” view is a button to put the watch into Power Reserve mode. Perhaps a future version of the operating system will expose battery usage statistics on this page, like the Battery section of the Setting app on iOS. For now, there’s not very much to praise here.

Back to the main Control Center interface, one button down on the left side is the Silent Mode button, which will mute/unmute the sounds coming from the Apple Watch. I’ve had my Watch muted since the day I opened it, and I don’t ever plan to change that.

To the right of Silent Mode is Do Not Disturb. When this button is highlighted your Watch won’t buzz when notification are received. I find notifications to be pretty surreptitious regardless, and feeling the buzz myself does not bother me, so I’ve never found this feature very useful for my Apple Watch. If you do use it though, you can find the option in Control Center.

Back on the left side, below Silent Mode, is the iPhone locator button. I find this to be the most useful Control Center function by far. Tapping the button will cause the iPhone connected to the watch to give out a loud ring, whether or not the phone is silenced. While this is great for when you’re trying to find which couch cushion you left your iPhone under, I’d advise against tapping it in public when you haven’t lost your phone. It may garner some strange looks, like I just got before typing this paragraph.

To the right of the iPhone locator button is the Lock button. Tapping this will immediately lock your Apple Watch, requiring you to type your passcode back in or unlock your iPhone (if you have that feature turned on) to be able to use the Watch again. I’m not sure what kind of situation would require such a button, particularly since removing the Watch from your wrist locks it anyway, but it’s there if you ever need it.

The final button on the watchOS 3 Control Center interface is the AirPlay button. It lives on its own row at the very bottom, requiring you to scroll down to see it fully. Tapping it will reveal any AirPlay-capable devices that the Watch finds nearby (iOS devices, including the Watch’s connected iPhone, do not appear in this list), and tapping those will redirect any audio or video streams coming from the Watch to whichever device is chosen. If you pick up some of Apple’s new AirPods next month, this button might become a lot more useful to you.

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. Instead, Now Playing has been moved to the Dock, which simply makes no sense with the rest of the Dock paradigm.

The Dock is supposed to contain apps, but Now Playing is not an app in and of itself. It is sort of a piece of the Music app, but the actual now playing screen within the Music app is its own separate thing (of note here: the Music app’s now playing screen can’t control audio from external sources, such as podcasts). Rather than taking up one of only ten highly valuable slots in the Dock (it can of course be removed, but then it is not accessible anywhere, and it’s certainly a useful interface), the Now Playing screen should be returned to exactly where it was in watchOS 2: available via an upward swipe from the watch face.

No matter which way I look at this, I continue to be confused by Apple’s decision to move Now Playing to the Dock. On iOS, where the Control Center idea came from, audio playback controls have always been a part of the interface. In iOS 10 these controls have been moved to a separate pane that is to the side of the system controls part of Control Center. In watchOS 2, audio playback controls already existed as its own Glance, separate from the system controls Glance, but available via a sideways swipe between the two. I don’t get why Apple didn’t leave the Now Playing screen exactly where it was, alongside the system controls, for the new watchOS Control Center.

The reason that this discrepancy bothers me so much is because of how much I loved the Now Playing screen in watchOS 2. The screen was the only Glance I ever used, so it was always the first thing available when I swiped up. In watchOS 3, I would love to have it permanently tied to the swipe up, in which case I would use Control Center all the time. Instead, Now Playing exists as a weird non-app in the Dock, where its ease of access is reduced since the Dock may be navigated to any particular app at any given time you open, requiring swiping around to get back to Now Playing.

This issue also makes Control Center feel like a wasted interface, where it could so easily have been a great interface. I think easy access to system control is fantastic, but the fact remains that system controls are required far more rarely on watchOS than they are on iOS. If Apple had placed the Now Playing screen alongside the system controls in Control Center, using the exact same configuration that people would be accustomed to from iOS 10, then the Control Center interface would be useful on a daily basis for controlling audio playback. On the rarer occasions when system controls really are needed, they would still be there too, right alongside Now Playing.

I have hope that at some point in the future Apple will correct this apparent oversight, and adjust the watchOS Control Center to mimic its iOS namesake (it could even have a third pane for easy access to HomeKit functions as well, just like the iOS version). In the meantime, I generally just pull out my iPhone and use the music controls there instead of messing with the interface to get to the Now Playing screen on my Watch. Audio controls, in my experience, need to be readily available to suddenly pause a song to talk to someone, or jump backward 30 seconds in a podcast when I miss something that was said. watchOS 3 has sadly made it too fiddly to access the Now Playing screen – one of the few things I actually loved in watchOS 2. It is a rare step backward in an overall very successful update, and I hope Apple eventually sees what seems so obvious to me, and rectifies the problem.

Unlock your Mac

Another headline new feature of watchOS 3 goes in tandem with macOS Sierra, the upcoming update to Apple’s desktop operating system. Aptly named Unlock your Mac, the feature does exactly what its name suggests. When you enable the ability in your Mac’s settings, all you have to do is bring your Watch into the vicinity of your Mac, and the Mac will unlock if it is on the login screen.

While I was very excited about this feature at first, I find that I’ve cooled on it in practice. I think future updates have the opportunity to make it much better, but for now, the process of unlocking the Mac moves slower than I had hoped. When you turn on your Mac’s screen and the Apple Watch starts to do its thing, you’ll see an “Unlocking…” message show up on the screen of the Mac while it does the authentication handshake. This usually only takes a second or two, but the big problem I’ve experienced is that doing nothing for even just one second feels like a much longer amount of time that it does to do something (i.e., typing your password) for a few seconds.

It takes me about two to three seconds (on a bad day) to type my password and hit return to unlock my Mac. This amount of time is so close to the one to two seconds it takes to unlock the Mac from the Apple Watch that I still prefer typing over waiting.

The latency of this feature disappoints me, but I have hope that now that it exists, future macOS and watchOS updates will optimize it and make it as fast as it needs to be. The dream of my Mac being unlocked already the moment I want to interact with it is still appealing, but perhaps by this time next year we’ll have Macs with Touch ID sensors that are going to be faster for this process anyway.

For now, if you want to try out Unlock you Mac on your own devices, there’s a couple things you need to note. First off, it requires you to have two-factor authentication set up on your devices (two-factor, which is different from the older two-step authentication). Once you’ve done that, the setting will show up under Settings -> Security & Privacy -> General on your Mac, and enabling it should get the process running for you.

Notifications and Scribble

The general design of Notifications in watchOS 3 has remained the same as it was in watchOS 1 and 2, but within these bounds there have been some minor changes. Mainly, a few new capabilities have been introduced for third-party developers, and the interface for replying to notifications has received an upgrade. I’ll start with the latter.

In watchOS 1 and 2, notifications which supported replies, such as those from Messages or Mail, had options for replying via voice, emoji, or static responses. In watchOS 3, these options are still around, but there’s also a new feature called Scribble.

Scribble allows you to draw letters on the screen of your Watch, manually writing out your response letter by letter. As the system reads and understand the letters you draw, it displays your message up to whichever point you’re at on the screen above the drawing area. Below the drawing area are two buttons – space and delete. Any characters besides them must be drawn on the screen. When finished, the send button at the top will send off the message.

The character recognition for Scribble is very strong. Apple has come a long way since the Newton. When drawing on Scribble’s text field, you can begin drawing the next letter directly on top of the first one without waiting for Scribble to finish parsing. Scribble is surprisingly adept at understanding the difference between drawing different letters and drawing the extra bits on the same letters (like dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s).

The Scribble feature has surprised me not only for how well its character recognition works, but also for how useful I’ve found it. I don’t use it extremely often, but there have been multiple situations over the last few months when I’ve been apart from my iPhone, or when taking my iPhone out wasn’t a great option, and the Scribble feature has come in handy.

The Scribble feature has surprised me not only for how well its character recognition works, but also for how useful I’ve found it.

All in all, Apple’s implementation of Scribble is so strong that I find it hard to imagine a much better way of entering completely custom text on the Apple Watch’s tiny screen. Dictating texts is of course an alternative, but oftentimes moments when you can’t use your phone coincide with moments when you can’t talk out loud to your Watch. Furthermore, dictating to your Watch is not nearly as versatile as writing out text yourself. For instance, there are certain names that dictation simply will not spell right, and certain words that it frequently confuses with others.

In my opinion though, the biggest issue with using dictation for responses is that it removes personality from messages. Everybody has their own personality through text, down to the tiny details such as different spellings of common words. To me the most egregious of dictation’s particular spellings is outputting “ha ha” rather than “haha”. All of these issues can be bypassed by using Scribble, at least for short message responses.

The other advantage that Scribble has over dictation is that it’s possible to include emoji in a message when using Scribble. This is done via Scribble’s suggestions feature, which is essentially the Apple Watch version of the suggestions bar that appears above text fields in iOS.

As you are scribbling letters, a small up-and-down arrow icon will appear next to a word when watchOS has some alternate suggestions for it. To access the list of suggestions, simply spin the Digital Crown and the list will appear on top of the Scribble interface. Most of these suggestions are alternate word spellings, tweaking of capitalizations, or longer words that the Watch suspects you may be in the process of spelling. These suggestions can be useful since the only other way to change part of a word is to delete all the way from the end of the word to the mistake and then rewrite from there.

One case suggestions excels at is getting capitals of letters where the capital and lowercase versions are the same except for sizing. For instance, if you want to start a word with a capital “S”, Scribble will try to recognize this based on the size of the “S” you draw on the screen. In practice, that works only decently well, and it’s often quicker to just leave the lowercase “s” and then change it via the suggestions interface after you finish writing the word. In my experience, there is almost always a suggestion to change the capitalization of the first letter of any word that you write.

Getting back to the emoji: one of the possibilities that will often be surfaced by suggestions are emoji based on the word that is being suggested for. This doesn’t work for all emoji, but many that can be explained simply in one word will be suggested when you write the word out. A few useful examples: spinning the Crown after writing “smiley” will offer up a smiley face emoji, “sad” will give a sobbing emoji, “heart” will give a heart emoji, and “done” will get a green check emoji (strangely, “check” does not offer up this emoji).

I definitely think that Apple could have included a better way of adding emoji into messages while using Scribble. For instance, there’s an empty space in the lower left corner of the interface where they could have added a third button alongside space and delete. This could have been the emoji button, and tapping it could show the standard emoji picker interface, allowing you to pick from all the emoji and insert one into the text. In the absence of something like that, it’s good that there is now at least some way of adding emoji inline into text messages via the Apple Watch. Before Scribble’s suggestions, the only way to send emoji from the Watch was one at a time, by themselves, with no text attached.

Suggestions in Scribble are not limited to the last word that you’ve written. As you draw out words, Scribble will show the contents of your text on a single line near the top of the interface. If your message stretches out further than will fit on this line, you’ll see a “…” before the first word to indicate this, and you can then swipe the line left or right to see the text that has gone off the screen.

The line does more than just preview your message. If you tap on any word within the line of text that you have written, it will highlight in green. You can then spin the Digital Crown to activate suggestions for the word in question. When you’re done picking a suggestion, you can wait a moment for the interface to go away, or tap the word again to dismiss the suggestions. At this point, your cursor will have moved to be at the end of the word you just changed, so if you continue writing you will be inserting at this point rather than at the end.

If you want to move the insertion point for your message without activating suggestions, just double tap the word that you want to start inserting behind. Again, you can only place the cursor at the end of words – there’s no way to pick up editing in the middle of one.

The last thing to note about Scribble is its language support. I hope that the options are expanded soon, but currently Scribble has support for three different languages: English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. I don’t have the language skills to test these out myself, but Apple demonstrated Scribble’s ability to translate Chinese on stage at WWDC and it certainly looked as strong and as quick to process as English translations. Swapping between languages is easy: you just have to force press the notification screen to bring up the “Change Language” option. Tap that and you’ll see the list of languages that you have set up for keyboards on your iPhone. Pick the one you’d like to Scribble in and the interface will change to accept that input (note that this will also change the input accepted by dictation and the labels for reply buttons). You do have to change the language before opening the Scribble interface. Force Touching within the interface does nothing at all.

That’s it for Scribble, the biggest new addition to input and notifications in watchOS 3. You should now see the Scribble option in any notification or area of an app that utilizes the standard Apple Watch text input interface.

Now on to a few more changes to watchOS notifications.

For Messages notifications, Apple has promoted reply options to the top level. This means that you’ll now have access to Scribble, dictation, emoji, and Digital Touch replies immediately in the notification. In watchOS 1 and 2 you had to first tap on “Reply” before you would see these buttons. Removing a step is always a good improvement in my book, so I’m pleased with this small change.

The emoji options on the Watch are mostly the same, with the scrollable list of regular emoji now displayed first, and the weird giant Apple Watch emoji accessible by swiping to the left. Swiping right from the standard emoji will show a new set of options, which is your recently used stickers from iOS 10. There’s no way to access the full sticker packs to send whatever you’d like, but if you have some favorite stickers that you send regularly, they’ll be available in this section so that you can send them straight from your Apple Watch.

All of the changes to the notification reply interface have also been reflected into the watchOS Messages app, where they are accessible at the bottom of conversations as the reply options. Beyond that bump, Messages for watchOS has not received any significant upgrades this year around (there’s no way to send Messages with effects like you can in iOS 10, although you can see the effects on the Watch if a friend sends one).

The final new development for notifications in watchOS 3 is the introduction of some new abilities that third-party developers will be able to take advantage of. Mainly, this is animations and other more powerful inline elements in notifications.

I’ll discuss some of these new capabilities a bit more in depth in the System section, but the important thing to know is that developers are now able to include custom inline content in their notifications. This can be live-streaming videos from HomeKit cameras, pictures, 2D or 3D animations, and more. The limitations do not seem to be particularly strict as far as I can tell, so it will be interesting to see what kinds of things developers come up with to improve their notifications.

I do see the risk here of notifications becoming too showy and including less useful content, but let’s hope most developers will use these new abilities as a force for good.

The design changes in watchOS 3 are rigorous, and ruthless. Sidestepping the lure of hubris, Apple amputated entire interfaces which they toted just one year ago. This has shown an impressive ability to look unbiased at a product which they built from nothing, recognizing and righting its flaws for the good of all its users.

WatchOS 3’s interface changes have renewed my hope for the future of the system, as well as my enjoyment in wearing my Apple Watch every day. With the majority of the most egregious flaws out of the way, Apple has eliminated the baggage of poor design decisions in the system’s early days, and cleared a path for future versions of watchOS to look forward rather than back.

Apps

Despite the huge amount of design effort channeled into the fundamental interfaces of the operating system, I was surprised by how many standalone first-party apps Apple still got around to building for watchOS 3. None of these apps are particularly complex, and all but one of them already exists on iOS. Still, it’s good to see Apple moving more apps over to the Watch, and I particularly love the extremely simple design language that all of the new first-party Watch apps have in common.

Apple is leading the way forward in watchOS app design, building simple and straightforward interfaces so users can get in and get out. I hope to see third-party developers follow these trends with their own apps as well.

Reminders

Reminders for watchOS is an incredibly simple app, including just three different views and with its only real functions being to check or uncheck reminders as completed. Opening the app will reveal the same group of reminder lists that you’re familiar with from its iOS counterpart (although, mercifully, without the paper-texture background). Each list displays its name and the number of incomplete reminders within it.

Tapping on a list will display a stack of reminders that have been added to it, each with an open circle on the side that can be tapped to mark the item as completed. Completed items will remain visible (so that you can uncheck them again if need be) until you return to the main view, or when the app is purged from memory.

If you’d like to see all completed items in a list, you can force press on the interface to reveal a “Show Completed” button, and tapping that will reveal them. Completed items show in the exact same way as incomplete ones (and will appear below any still-incomplete items in the list), except their circles are filled in. Tapping these circles will uncheck them and return the item to an incomplete state.

That’s it! Those are all the functions and views of the watchOS 3 Reminders app. The app does not support any explicit method of creating new reminders – it only allows marking and unmarking reminders that already exist. If you do need to create a reminder from your Apple Watch, you can of course do this in the same way you’ve always been able to: by using Siri. Once created with Siri, the reminder should show up in the watchOS Reminders app.

All-in-all, there’s really not much to say about Reminders for watchOS, except that I think it’s a pretty solid example of what a watchOS app should be like. The app is simple and to the point. It doesn’t waste time on extraneous functions or interfaces that users rarely will need or want on their Apple Watches.

I think that any third-party reminder app would need to at least add a button to create new reminders via the app, but the first-party one can get away without that option due to its tight integration with Siri. I suppose iOS 10 apps could use SiriKit to get this same advantage, but many users will likely be unaware of the option to interact with third-party apps via Siri, at least for quite some time.

Even for Apple’s Reminders, where users are far more likely to know about the ability to add reminders from Siri, I still feel like it wouldn’t hurt to include a Force Touch option to add a reminder manually. Sometimes using Siri isn’t practical, and with the new Scribble feature available it makes sense to expose interfaces for manually typing text. This seems like a natural fit for reminders in particular, as these are often very short messages that could be written out quickly and easily with Scribble. Force Touching on the main screen of the Reminders app currently does nothing at all, so the app even has space available were a “New Reminder” button could be added. Maybe next time, I suppose.

Beyond that minor nitpick, there’s not much else to complain about with Reminders for watchOS. The app is quick to load and quick to navigate, and it includes a launcher Complication so it can be added to watch faces for frequent users.

For watchOS apps, it’s always better to err toward too simple than toward too complex. Reminders falls at an acceptable point along this continuum, and is a solid addition to the stock watchOS apps.

Timer

The Timer app has been completely redesigned in watchOS 3 to align with Apple’s extra simple design language. Rather than opening to a large circle and requiring you to spin the Digital Crown to set a number of minutes for your timer before you could start it, Timer now opens to a grid of timers, each with different common counts. If the timer you want to start matches one of them, just tap the button to start it. If you’re looking for a timer that is different from these, just scroll to the bottom and tap “Custom” to open up the old Timer interface and choose your own time.

The new Timer is just another example of watchOS apps designed to get to the point. The best apps on the Watch will prove to be those that need as little user interaction as possible to complete what user is looking to do with them.

Breathe

Breathe is a rare example of an app unique only to watchOS, not yet included on any of Apple’s other systems. The sole purpose of Breathe is to facilitate breathing exercises for Apple Watch wearers, and it is another great example of the simplicity that most watchOS apps should be shooting for.

The Breathe app opens to a single page with a blue-green flower-like shape in the background. The large button at the bottom reads “Start”, and will begin a breathing exercise for the number of minutes specified in the top right. In the upper left you’ll see how many breaths will be taken throughout the exercise, and in the center are statistics on how many minutes of breathing you’ve done today, as well as what your heart rate was after the last exercise.

Spinning the Digital Crown while on the main screen will adjust the number of minutes (as well as the number of breaths) up or down. Once the setting is where you want it, pressing the Start button will begin the exercise.

Each breathing exercise consists of nothing more than breathing deeply in and out, with the Apple Watch setting the pace. When an exercise is begun, the Breathe app interface slides away, except for the blue flower. Below the flower the text “Be still, and bring your attention to your breath” fades in. After a few moments, the flower contracts, and then begins to expand while the words “Now inhale…” fade in. As the flower expands, the Apple Watch’s Taptic engine begins to vibrate, first quickly and then slowly as the flower grows close to filling the screen. Once the flower reaches its peak, it begins to shrink as the words “And exhale.” fade through.

From there, the flower continues to expand and contract, coinciding with taps from the Apple Watch, until the number of minutes specified at the beginning are up. As long as you match your inhaling and exhaling to the flower or the taps, then by the end of the exercise you will have taken the number of breathes specified at the beginning.

When the exercise completes, the words “Well Done.” fade through momentarily. Then the flower spins away, morphing into the twisted arrow shape that is the Breathe app’s icon5 and a summary of the interval shows up on the screen.

The summary shows the total number of minutes that you have spent on breathing exercises for the day, as well as your current heart rate following the exercise. At the bottom is a single button labeled “Breathe Again”, which will return you to the original screen of the Breathe app.

The only other aspect of Breathe are the new Time to Breathe notifications that are sent in watchOS 3. These are essentially the same as the Time to Stand notifications that you’re likely familiar with from watchOS 1 and 2 (those are still around too, if you haven’t turned them off by now).

Time to Breath notifications pop up throughout the day when you aren’t using the Breathe app regularly. They include a button to launch the Breathe app so that you can run a breathing exercise. Time to Breath notifications can be turned off in the Breathe app settings area of the iOS Watch app.

Overall, I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed using the Breathe app. I don’t follow the Time to Breathe notifications, but I’ve left them on so that I get periodic reminders that the feature exists and is available to use when I need it. Personally, I’ve found that in times when I’m feeling excessively stressed, using the Breathe app can calm me and make me feel a bit better and more refreshed. I’ve even found them to be helpful for reducing headaches. Your mileage, I’m sure, will vary.

Breathing exercises aren’t for everyone. I’m not even sure that they’re really for me, as while I’ve mostly enjoyed them when I do them, I still haven’t been converted into someone who utilizes them every day. Still, even if you’re skeptical, I would encourage you to at least give them a shot when you install watchOS 3. You may be surprised by how much you like their calming effect. At the very least, it’s nice to have another option in your tool belt when life starts to feel overwhelming.

I think the Breathe app is great, and I love to see Apple expanding the number of possible ways for the Apple Watch to help people’s health, both mental and physical. I have no complaints with Breathe, but I would love to see an even deeper set of statistics at the end of an exercise. Help me compare my hearth rate before, during, and after the exercise. Show me the benefits of breathing for longer sessions. I’m sure Apple will get to these kinds of stats in the future, and I’m excited to see where this app goes, and how its received by users.

Home

The new watchOS Home app presents a list of any HomeKit devices you have connected, and allows you to tap on one to change or view its states. The app will also pop up with notifications when certain devices are triggered, such as a doorbell camera, and the notifications will have the live video from the camera directly on them.

The Home app is simple, but in my opinion, Apple didn’t quite go in the right direction with it. I’m trying to get more HomeKit devices to try out Apple’s system more rigorously, but for now the main home automation system in my home is SmartThings, and it offers a watchOS app as well. The SmartThings app only includes options for triggering “Routines”, SmartThings’ term for activating several preset settings on multiple connected devices at once. In general, I find this a better option for a watchOS app, as it allows getting more done at once, changing the home’s whole feel between preset modes. On the other hand, SmartThings’ app has no ability to deal with devices on an individual level, which sometimes is the only thing needed.

Comparing the two systems, I think a combination of Apple’s and SmartThings’ watchOS apps would make the best possible smartwatch home automation app. Expose whatever the system’s word for “Routines” is in the main screen, but enable switching over to a per-device mode of control via a Force Touch menu option. This kind of interface will be simple up front, and expose the controls to do the most at once. Yet behind an intuitive and quick menu it would expose the more granular controls that I often find myself wanting in the SmartThings watchOS app 6. Perhaps a third-party developer will be able to make an app like this for HomeKit using the new watchOS HomeKit APIs.

Heart Rate

The Heart Rate app has come about in lieu of the Heart Rate Glance going away. The app is nothing more than the single page that the Glance was, and opening it will automatically begin a measurement of your heart rate. If you miss the Heart Rate Glance, just place the Heart Rate app in your Dock to get the same effect.

This app is another case where I could see a slightly more complicated interface bringing something good to the table. I would love to see the Heart Rate app allow you to scroll down or swipe to the side to see some sort of over-time view of your heart rate data. Even just a daily average over the past week, or a few data points throughout the last few hours could be cool, and adding this would not overcomplicate the app.

Find My Friends

Find My Friends has been introduced on Apple Watch in watchOS 3. The app is very similar to its iOS counterpart, displaying a list of those who have shared their locations with you as its main page. Tap on a friend in the list to see an interface with their name, the city and state they’re in, how many miles from you they are, and a map on which their location is represented.

Scroll down and you can see the exact address of your friend’s location, as well as three buttons. The button with a picture of a car on it will open up the watchOS Maps app with a route set up from your location to theirs. The message bubble button will switch you to the Messages app and automatically open your conversation with this friend. Finally, the Contact button at the bottom will open up the friend’s contact information, which contains a button to call them as well as another message bubble button.

I think the watchOS Find My Friends app is great. I’ve got no real complaints, and nothing else I feel like the app should add. It does everything I expect and everything I need from it.

Watch for iPhone

The Apple Watch app for iPhone has received a significant facelift in iOS 10 to go along with watchOS 3. The My Watch page which the app opens to is now dominated by a central view of the different watch faces you have set up. You can swipe horizontally to scroll through the faces, and tap one to edit it. You can also tap the edit button above the list to change the order of faces, or delete them.

Above the list of faces is a section displaying the Apple Watch that you are viewing. As of iOS 9.3/watchOS 2.2, you can pair multiple Apple Watches to your iPhone, and this section is where you will deal with that complication. Tapping anywhere on the section will open a view where you can choose to pair a new Apple Watch to your iPhone. When you have multiple watches paired, you can also switch between them from this page. That said, since I’m not currently operating with a day watch and a night watch, I don’t have a second Apple Watch to test out exactly what that interface looks like. In theory, you should see all paired Apple Watches with their names, descriptions, and pictures of the face they are currently displaying. Tapping one of these will change the main interface to display all the details of the selected Apple Watch rather than one of the other ones you have paired.

For most people, the important part of this paired watch page is the small info button on the right side of the picture of their paired watch. Tapping this info button is how you access the Find My Apple Watch feature, which will let you locate, enable Lost Mode, or erase a lost Apple Watch. You can also unpair your watch from this page, which you’ll want to do if you’re selling or returning it, or giving it away.

Back to the My Watch page, the new interface for editing watch faces on the iPhone is a breath of fresh air for anyone who has become frustrated trying to go through all the options on their Apple Watch. After tapping on one of your watch faces that you’d like to edit, you’ll see a new screen with the top half displaying the look of your watch face. The bottom half is where you access all of the options, such as setting the highlight colors for the face, picking from the different styles (if the face supports them), and choosing Complications.

The Complications section is the best part here, as that has always been the most annoying aspect of setting up a watch face on the Apple Watch. If you have a large number of available Complications for your Watch apps, picking the one you want from the iPhone app’s interface will go much quicker, and the preview section gives you the same clear idea of what the finished product will look like.

At the bottom of the interface, you can choose to set your newly edited watch face as the current face on your Apple Watch, which has the same effect as swiping over to it with edge swipes on the Watch itself. You can also remove the face from the bottom of that interface, useful if you’re experimenting with designs and decide the entire face is not what you’re looking for.

While the My Faces list in the My Watch tab allows you to reorganize, edit, and remove your existing watch faces, it is not where you turn if you want to add a brand new face. For this, there is an entirely new tab in the Watch app for iOS – the Face Gallery tab.

Opening Face Gallery will show a page filled with different horizontal lists of watch faces. The top section, for now at least, is labeled “New in watchOS 3”. It currently includes all the new faces mentioned earlier: Activity Digital, Numerals, Minnie Mouse, and Activity Analog (their order, not mine). Below this section is a “Featured Complications” section, which shows a wide variety of watch faces, each with an app icon and name below them. On each face, you’ll find the Complication for the app in question (although faces with multiple complication slots will have Complications from other, unmentioned apps as well).

Tapping the See All button in the top right of the Featured Complications section will direct you to a new page with dedicated lists for each of the featured Complications. Scrolling across the list for each app will show the look of the app’s Complication on every available watch face. If the app supports different layouts of Complications, each face will show the Complication in every available layout (such as the long layout at the bottom of Utility as well as the small layout in the top right or left of Utility).

Anytime you see a layout (on any of these lists in the entire Face Gallery tab) that you think looks interesting, you can tap it to open up the same edit view as you see when editing your already-added faces from the My Watch tap. In the Faces Gallery, you’ll see an extra ‘ADD’ button under the title at the top which will allow you to push the new face to your Apple Watch.

Back on the main Face Gallery page, if you scroll down below the top two lists, you’ll get into lists of every individual watch face that is available. Scrolling horizontally across lists will preview every color and variation on the face, other than Complications (which seem to be picked randomly and scattered across the faces). When you see one you like, just tap, edit, and add it to your Watch.

Watch App Store and Settings

The other tabs of the Watch app for iOS are the same App Store and App Store Search that they have always been. It’s worth noting that if you’re looking specifically for apps that contain Apple Watch apps, you can use the App Store tab in the Watch app rather than the actual iOS App Store. All apps present here will show screenshots from their Apple Watch interfaces rather than their iPhone interfaces, although iPhone screenshots can be accessed via the ‘Additional Screenshots’ button that shows up below the Watch screenshots. (That button will also be present on the entry for these apps in the standard App Store as well, but will display their Watch photos since their iOS photos are shown by default there.)

While the last tab in this app is used to search the Apple Watch App Store, you can also search the settings of the Watch app itself. Like in the main iOS Settings app, this search field lies at the top of the My Watch section, where all of the settings are contained. It works as expected – nothing particularly special about it.

As you scroll down through that My Watch page you’ll also run into a few other new changes. There’s a new top level settings page for the Dock, which allows you to add, remove, and reorder the apps that show up in the Dock on your Apple Watch. This is definitely a better interface for doing all of these things than doing it on the Watch is, and it’s also a good place to be able to quickly scan through all of your Apple Watch apps and determine which ones will be most useful in the Dock.

If you change the order of apps from the Dock area of the Watch app while you have your actual Dock open on your Apple Watch, you can actually see the app snapshots zoom around if you move those on either side of the snapshot you are looking at. If you move the snapshot you’re looking at itself then those on both sides will slide away and its new neighbors will slide back in. A nice touch.

Besides the above, other changes to the iOS Watch app are just small settings scattered throughout. In General you’ll find the Emergency SOS settings page, where you can set up your emergency contacts who you want to be notified if you ever trigger an Emergency SOS call. This is also the page where you can turn off auto-call if you don’t want the feature to be activated by holding a button for too long.

General also contains a new setting to enable screenshots on the Apple Watch, a feature which is disabled by default in watchOS 3. I’m pretty pleased with this option, as it has finally put an end to the semi-frequent accidental watch face screenshots that have been showing up in my camera roll over the past year and a half. If you ever do need to take screenshots on your Apple Watch (like when you decide to write a 20,000-word review of the operating system), just flip this setting back on until you’re done.

Further down on the My Watch screen, you’ll find the settings for the new Breathe app. If you’re not a fan of the Time to Breathe reminders, this is where to go to get those turned off. You can also set them to occur at more or less frequent intervals from this page.

If you think the breathing intervals themselves are too fast or too slow, you can find a setting here to speed them up or slow them down. The speed is set in breaths per minute, and the default is 7. You can speed it up to 10 breaths per minute, or slow it down to just 4. Below that option you’ll find a setting to adjust the strength of the haptic taps during breathing exercises (including turning them all the way off). Finally, at the very bottom, you can enable or disable “Use Previous Duration”. When on (the default), this setting automatically adjusts new breathing exercises to be the same length as the previous one you ran.

If you’re a wheelchair user, you should open up the Health setting in My Watch and change the Wheelchair option to ‘Yes’. This will cause your Apple Watch to start tracking pushes rather than steps (we’ll get to more on this later). Setting the Wheelchair option to Yes also activates several new options under the Workout section of My Watch, where you can go to adjust the set of metrics that the Watch will display when you’re doing various workouts.

That’s all for the Watch app. With new additions like the Face Gallery, My Faces section, and Dock organization, I expect I might find myself opening this app up a bit more often this year than I did last. Either way, it’s definitely a much better way for new Watch users to get a sense of what kind of options they have for their watch faces and Complications.

Overall, watchOS 3 does not have anything particularly game-changing in terms of updated or new apps. All the changes to apps this time around feel natural and iterative. The Reminders and Find My Friends apps should have been around since the beginning, but at least they’re here now. The redesigned Timer app removes the finicky nature of its previous version, yet still keeps its old interface within reach for when it’s needed. The Heart Rate app is a direct port from the Heart Rate Glance, and while I’d love to get a bit more from it, there’s no argument that it doesn’t do what it promises in its current form.

The Home app is simple and gets the job done, but I think it will be mostly useful for its notifications and the occasional tweak of a light or thermostat when your phone is not within arm’s reach. Trying to change more than one device’s settings at a time will likely prove too slow and too many steps to be used frequently.

The new faces sections in the Watch app on iOS don’t technically allow anything new, but they make designing watch faces and picking Complications for them a much better and more enjoyable experience. I feel encouraged to experiment more because of them, and have designed a couple new faces for my Watch which I’ve enjoyed having in my repertoire.

The Breathe app is the only completely new application, and that one is indeed a great addition to the system. I hope to see more new apps like Breathe in the future – apps which come to the Apple Watch first because they fit its features and abilities better than any other platform.

I hope to see more new apps like Breathe in the future.

I also like Apple’s extremely simple approach to design for their watchOS apps, which seems to have grown even more focused for all of the new additions. A few of the apps could use a bit more depth, but I think it’s far better to start small and grow slowly than to overpack an app and end up with an interface that is too complicated to begin with. I hope to see third-party developers take note and start building their own Watch apps in a similar fashion.

The only Apple apps that remain to be discussed are the Activity and Workout apps, both of which belong to a larger discussion about watchOS 3’s new forays into health and fitness. Let’s jump in.

Activity

Timezones make things weird when everyone’s numbers reset at midnight.

According to Apple, one of the most frequent things people do with their Apple Watch is look at their activity rings. The fitness-focused portions of the Apple Watch are so popular that for Apple Watch Series 2, Apple is changing its entire marketing strategy to place them at the center. Clearly, health and fitness are important to the Apple Watch.

While the Breathe app is the only brand new health-related app that Apple introduced with watchOS 3, the company has also brought improvements to its watchOS Workout app, and its Activity app on both iOS and watchOS.

Activity Sharing

With watchOS 3, Apple has chosen to go after a time-honored strategy for making people work harder: competition. The new activity sharing feature lets you share your activity data with chosen friends or family. You can then see the data that they choose to expose and compare it with your own.

Activity sharing begins in the Activity app for iOS. As of iOS 10, the app now includes a new tab, labeled Sharing. Opening up this tab for the first time will reveal a blank page telling you to tap the plus button in the top corner, which will in turn bring up an interface to invite people to share their activity with you. Unlike location following in Find My Friends, activity sharing is a two way street. If someone accepts your invitation to share activity, you will both gain access to each others’ data.

Interestingly, Apple notes specifically in the “About Activity Sharing” page in the iOS Activity app that if you start sharing your activity with someone else, your activity data will then be sent to Apple so that they can securely share it with whomever you choose. Presumably this means that Apple stores shared activity data differently than non-shared activity data, although that may just signify holding it somewhere other than your iCloud account where it would be otherwise. Either way, Apple’s note says that they only keep shared activity data for a “short period of time”, and will use it only for this sharing feature.

It’s also worth noting that activity sharing occurs at the iCloud account level. If you get a new phone or watch, or if you have multiple phones or watches, then as long as you’re signed into your iCloud account on all of them your activity from each will be shared.

So what exactly is the “activity” that’s being shared? For starters, it is not your location. Location sharing and activity sharing are different things. Activity sharing contains the following data points: the state of your Activity Move ring, exercise minutes, stand hours, time-zone information (so those you share activity with will know when you started your day), and the types and durations of workouts that you run from your Apple Watch. After sharing your activity with someone, you can choose to enable or disable any of the above points of data, so they can only see the information you’re comfortable sharing.

You can see the data of those you have shared activity with in the Sharing tab of the iOS activity app, but you can also see it directly on your Apple Watch. Once someone has accepted your invitation to share with each other, open up the Apple Watch Activity app and swipe to the left. The whole interface will shift over and the shared activity view will slide in. This view contains an ordered list of everyone that you are sharing your activity with, including an entry for you that shows your own activity statistics.

If you force press on this list, you’ll see a Sort List option, and tapping that will allow you to pick a data point to sort the list by. Available choices are Name, Move, Exercise, Steps, and Workouts. Whichever you choose will re-sort your list so that you can see how you are stacking up for the day amongst your friends within a particular metric. The chosen metric will be displayed within the entry for each person on the list, next to their Move rings (which are present no matter what you sort by).

Within the list, you can tap on anyone’s entry to see a more detailed view of their activity for the day, as well as send them messages directly from your Watch (you can also choose to message everyone you have shared with at once via the “Send message to all” button at the very bottom of the shared activity list). The interface for sending messages from the Activity app includes a list of pre-configured, activity-themed suggestions. The options are…underwhelming, at best.

If you’d rather send a more custom response, the standard message composition controls discussed early reside at the bottom of the list, and can be used to compose something that is less unironic than the stock choices.

The last thing to note about shared activity is that third-party apps which use Apple’s health APIs can participate as well. If you choose to enable activity sharing for a third-party app, it can show up in the list of data points that your friends or family who you have shared with can see when they tap on your name in their list.

Apple’s implementation of activity sharing in watchOS 3 seems simple and well-thought-out. If anything can convince people to work out a bit more, it’s competition. Activity sharing arguably makes it easier than it’s ever been for regular people to compete with one another on some of these metrics. I’m not much of a fitness buff myself (I play soccer on Friday nights and that’s more or less my weekly exercise), but I think that this feature has the potential to be a game changer. Competition is key to many things in life. Time will tell if Apple’s take on competitive fitness is enough to push Apple Watch sales.

Wheelchair Users

The final fitness/health related upgrade in watchOS 3 is for wheelchair users. According to Apple in their WWDC keynote, wheelchair users love the Apple Watch for the easy access it gives them to messages and notifications throughout the day, but were unable to utilize the device’s key fitness features. Step counting, stand tracking, and more are all of course completely useless to wheelchair users.

With watchOS 3, Apple set out to fix this problem. They studied the different rolling techniques of many wheelchair users, and worked with two of the world’s largest organizations devoted to physical fitness for wheelchair users. As a result, they were able to develop an algorithm for the Apple Watch to allow it to track wheel turns and other wheelchair-specific activity for a large variety of techniques.

With watchOS 3, wheelchair users have a new setting (as mentioned earlier) in the Watch app for iOS. When they set the wheelchair setting to Yes, their Apple Watch will start tracking their movement using the new wheelchair-specific algorithms, rather than through the standard algorithms used for those who are not confined to a wheelchair.

With the wheelchair setting enabled, the Time to Stand reminders are changed to Time to Roll reminders instead. Worth noting for all the wheelchair users who I’m sure turned those off at some point in the last year and a half. If that’s something that interests you now, you can turn the reminders back on in the Activity settings section of the Watch app for iOS.

Finally, as also mentioned briefly earlier, turning on the wheelchair flag enables two extra workouts in the Workout app for Apple Watch. These workouts are “Outdoor Wheelchair Walk Pace” and “Outdoor Wheelchair Run Pace”.

Wheelchair users are often not specifically thought about in mass market fitness products, and it is great to see Apple taking the time to make sure this group of people is taken care of. It is especially great seeing that they did not tackle the problem half-heartedly, but spent what appears to be a considerable amount of effort making sure that they got it right. I hope that Apple does not rest on its laurels after this, but continues to improve the experience for wheelchair users even more in future updates. I also hope to see them expand this focus to other groups of people with different disabilities, and continue to make the Apple Watch the best device it can be for as diverse a set of people as possible.

System

Last year’s watchOS 2 release brought with it several massive system-wide changes for the Apple Watch. Third-party apps were allowed to run natively on the Watch for the first time. The brand new WatchConnectivity framework was introduced to facilitate background information transfers and real-time messaging between the Watch and its connected iPhone. NSURLSession allowed the Apple Watch to connect directly to Wi-Fi rather than relying solely on the iPhone for data. Native hardware such as the Digital Crown and Taptic Engine were opened up to third-parties as well, albeit only for extremely limited and specific use cases.

In the conclusion to my watchOS 2 review last year, I wrote:

Apple’s work with watchOS 2 has laid the foundation for the future of watchOS. While the update is not a full solution to nearly any of these problems, it creates a solid base for almost all of them. A base which, in classic Apple style, can then be iterated on for years to come.

With another year in the books, and the first major iteration on that operating system released to the public, it’s fair to say that my conclusion is holding strong. Apple’s system efforts with watchOS 2 are paying off. WatchConnectivity and NSURLSession have proven to be strong foundations indeed, with neither requiring major changes in watchOS 3, and both being utilized throughout the new additions to the system.

For the most part, these new additions fall into several main categories: background tasks, native events, and new system frameworks.

Background Tasks

Background tasks were an extremely limited resource in watchOS 2, and while that’s still true to an extent in watchOS 3, the limitations have been reduced significantly in several key areas. I mentioned background tasks briefly early on in regard to the enhanced privileges of apps in the Dock and apps with active Complications, but there are some other new types of background tasks as well.

Docked apps are given access to a specific type of background refresh, called Background Snapshot Refresh. This type of background activity is designed specifically to allow docked apps to update their user interfaces before a snapshot is taken for use in the Dock. As you scroll through the Dock, all the apps that you scroll by are not actively running – they are just snapshots of the most recently refreshed state of the app. Dock apps are allowed to update these snapshots at a significantly faster rate than apps that do not reside in the Dock are allowed to refresh their information, so most of the time the snapshots in the Dock should not be particularly stale.

Once you stop scrolling through the Dock and land on a particular snapshot, watchOS automatically starts that app up, so that it will be actually running in the shrunken back view. If you then tap on the app, it will zoom to fill the whole screen and be immediately responsive, because it was running before you tapped on it as well.

Once docked apps are running, watchOS will try to keep them in memory when they are exited for as long as it can. This is a similar strategy to iOS, except that the Apple Watch has significantly fewer resources. If you reopen an app from the Dock which never left memory, it will appear to be 100% responsive. If you try to open an app, even from the Dock, which has been purged from memory, you’ll likely experience a few seconds of latency as the Watch boots that app back up from scratch. In general, the Watch does its best to maintain as many resources for Docked apps as it can, so usually booting from scratch still takes significantly shorter time than it did in watchOS 2.

Still, developers are going to have to update their Apple Watch apps for watchOS 3 in order to completely make use of the Dock capabilities. While the Watch seems to do a pretty good job of keeping even watchOS 2 apps which are docked in a state where they load fairly quickly, I have experienced docked third-party apps taking nearly as long to load as watchOS 2 apps after not opening them for quite some time.

Apple first-party apps can take a couple of seconds if I catch them flat-footed too, but in general I haven’t seen any Apple apps take nearly as long as they used to in watchOS 2.

Complications in watchOS 3 are more or less the same deal as apps in the Dock. Rather than using Background Snapshot Refresh, Complications use Background App Refresh. This fulfills essentially the same purpose, except that the system does not take a snapshot of the app’s interface after refreshing. Apps whose Complications are active on the user’s watch face are guaranteed to get 50 push updates each day, so developers who take advantage of these changes should be able to keep their Complications as up to date as most use cases would need them to be.

Apps with active Complications and docked apps can both make use of Background Watch Connectivity and Background URL Session tasks, which allow them to receive updated information from a paired iPhone and from the web, respectively.

Workout apps are the final class of apps which receive access to background tasks, and these get the unprecedented ability to actively run in the background while a workout that they are being used for is ongoing. For the duration of the workout, the app which is controlling it will be active and capable of receiving live HealthKit data from the Watch’s various sensors. Workout apps can even be launched programmatically to run in the background if the workout is started from their iPhone companion app.

Native Events

The next portion of new watchOS enhancements for third-party apps is access to native events from various Watch hardware. Native event handling means the app can get live updates from a hardware sensor or input method on the Apple Watch while the event is occurring. This capability is commonplace on iOS and macOS, but has until now been extremely limited in scope for watchOS apps.

Native Digital Crown Access

With watchOS 3, third-party apps are now given access to the native event stream directly out of the Digital Crown. This means that third-party apps are free to implement the Digital Crown in whatever way they want, including as a gameplay mechanic or other creative and interesting application. In watchOS 2 apps were able to access the Digital Crown, but only as some type of “picker” element. In other words, the Crown could be used to pick an item from a list, but not to move a character around arbitrarily in a game. Kind of.

That “kind of” comes from the fact that one of the picker interfaces was a custom image collection that the Digital Crown could scroll through. This could be used to produce a similar effect to the watchOS Timer app’s custom timer interface, where extra ticks on the clock show up as the Crown moves. While this did make games and other creative applications of the Crown possible, they could be much more intensive to create because the entire interface needed to be made up of pictures that the Crown would scroll through to simulate free movement. With watchOS 3, developers are no longer limited in this manner. They can get access to the raw stream of data directly from the Crown, and do with it what they please.

Native Touch/Gesture Access

Believe it or not, before watchOS 3, third-party developers didn’t even have full access to users touching the screen. Rather, Apple handled touches and swipes itself and simply called standard operations for the third-party apps to follow. For the majority apps, which are mostly just going to be tapping buttons and swiping through pages anyway, this isn’t really a big issue. But for games or other more innovative app ideas, the ability to get access to the native touch or swipe events from a user and do whatever the developer chooses with it could allow for some much more interesting app offerings on the Apple Watch. We’ll have to wait and see what developers cook up.

Real-Time Heart Rate and Motion Data

watchOS 3 enables real-time access by third-party apps to heart rate and motion data coming from the Apple Watch’s variety of different sensors. For fitness and health apps, this means they’ll be able to provide live interfaces during activity showing exactly what is going on, rather than having to wait until the system provides them with this data later on. Workout apps running in the background will be able to monitor conditions live as well, which is the kind of change that makes apps like the upcoming Pokémon Go for Apple Watch possible. If that app was unable to run in the background, or unable to get real-time access to your position and movement data, it would be rendered more or less useless.

System Frameworks

Finally, watchOS 3 is adding support for a variety of new system frameworks. Many of these are familiar, such as SceneKit and SpriteKit, because they already exist on Apple’s other platforms. Seeing many of the most important system frameworks from iOS and macOS make their way onto the Watch is fascinating. We’re seeing an operating system transition from its absolute infancy into its childhood7. watchOS is beginning to show a small semblance of its more mature older siblings, and I’m sure these new frameworks will be built out even stronger in future versions, as well as being joined by many, many more.

SceneKit and SpriteKit

SceneKit and SpriteKit are familiar terms from OS X (now macOS, but OS X when SceneKit was introduced) and iOS development, and now they’ve come to the Apple Watch. SceneKit is a framework for rendering and animating 3D models in a watchOS app. SpriteKit is similar, but for 2D sprite animations. Both frameworks can be utilized anywhere within watchOS app interfaces, but they can also be used to render 3D or 2D content for notifications.

With SceneKit or SpriteKit, developers will have the option of adding animations onto their notifications in watchOS 3. If it makes sense for a developer’s app, it looks like a great way to make a notification a bit more fun and eye-catching, and could even convey information in and of itself (like having different animations for different types of notifications from the same app).

CloudKit

The CloudKit framework allows watchOS apps to place and access content into and from iCloud containers. In other words, its a way for watchOS apps to directly save and load data from iCloud without having to go through their iPhone counterparts.

AVFoundation and Core Audio

The AVFoundation framework will let third-party developers manage and play audio through their Apple Watch apps, and the Core Audio framework provides the audio streams and other important minutia needed for audio file handling.

GameKit

The GameKit framework helps developers create social games by integrating their games into Game Center. This will give Apple Watch apps access to Game Center themselves, making standalone Apple Watch games that connect to Game Center possible without necessitating an iPhone version of the game as well.

HomeKit

The HomeKit framework goes along with the new Home app, and enables support for displaying live streams from camera or doorbell accessories inline within apps, as well as communicating with other HomeKit devices.

Inline Video and Apple Pay

Speaking of inline video, third-party watchOS 3 apps aren’t limited to HomeKit device streams for this, but have the ability to present any videos inline within their apps.

Another new inline ability is the introduction of Apple Pay to watchOS apps. In previous versions users could use their Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay at physical terminals. In watchOS 3, developers can use the PassKit framework to set up in-app payments via the Apple Pay mechanic on the Watch.

Taken altogether, the system enhancements in watchOS 3 enable a huge variety of new capabilities for watchOS 3 apps. With the strict limitations on Apple Watch apps being rapidly reduced, and the general performance enhancements of watchOS 3, the platform is looking like it could be a lot more tempting for developers to get into. We’ll see in the coming year whether the third iteration of Apple’s smartwatch operating system can start to regain the interest of developers.

Conclusion

watchOS 3 brings new advances to Apple’s smartwatch operating system in nearly all of the areas where its predecessors were lacking. The Cupertino company has redesigned core interfaces across the OS, and rethought their approach to distributing limited system resources. The results of their efforts are impressive, and the benefits are axiomatic throughout everyday use.

In retrospect, the idea of the underpowered Apple Watch hardware fueling every app on the system seems quixotic at best, and benighted at worst. This ardent objective was one of the main downfalls of watchOS 2, but its revision is a keystone of watchOS 3. By surrendering the pursuit of an unreachable ideal, the system has been freed to focus on obtainable goals.

The outcome of this course correction is an Apple Watch unafraid of its limitations. With clever new interfaces, watchOS 3 even recasts them as advantages. Rather than Apple trying to regulate resources for every app on the system, this task is now yielded to the user through the Dock and Complications. The result is a Dock of ten favorite apps which actually function, and Complications with up-to-date information whose apps can be opened on the fly. This picture is the same one that Apple wanted for watchOS 2, but by reducing its scope to a reasonable level, watchOS 3 achieves it on a smaller scale.

While the power distributions and interface designs of watchOS 2 aged poorly, not everything from the update was a failure. In particular, Apple’s work last year on the NSURLSession and WatchConnectivity frameworks laid the foundation for nearly all of the new system enhancements in watchOS 3.

I think the best way to look at watchOS today is to fully separate the interface and the system elements. Building a smartwatch operating system is a huge challenge on both of these levels, and Apple’s first shot at the interface didn’t go in. These design missteps, however, are of little consequence to most of the system-level decisions.

In watchOS 1, Apple built a system framework that was incomplete by design. Rather than rush out the foundation they were building, they held back until it was properly finished, and released it with watchOS 2. While that decision caught them a lot of flack from the press and developers alike, time has borne it out as prescient. Power distribution needed some adjustment, but beyond that, almost everything at the system level of watchOS 2 has been kept around to make up the building blocks of watchOS 3.

In watchOS 3, the interface side of the update establishes a new foundation in the same way that the system side did in watchOS 2. While it may have taken a year of the Watch being in consumers’ hands for Apple to figure it out, their second attempt truly looks like a solid base to build upon. The Dock and Complications are an opportunity to get a small-scale system running as smoothly as the entirety of the OS surely will in several years. From here Apple can work to expand slowly toward that vision, as well as adding new features year-over-year rather than wasting time rebuilding the old.

There’s still a lot more to do for interfaces in watchOS. The Home screen layout could use a revisal, Control Center needs the Now Playing screen, and I’d love to see a feature like Time Travel reimagined in a new form that might actually be useful. As a whole, though, I no longer think of watchOS with disdain. Apps feel useable, the side button is no longer wasted, and Complications are really kept up to date.

watchOS 3 is a huge step forward for the Apple Watch. After two years of turmoil and a potent feeling that the platform was lost, it has suddenly snapped into focus. With a new direction plotted and its misguided hubris in check, the future of the Apple Watch is looking brighter than ever before.

Of course, most buttons on previous Apple devices have been named far less nebulously than “side button”. ↩︎

No? Just me? Hm. ↩︎

This is a digital watch. Please Apple, start moving the date dynamically so that it’s not covered by the hands for hours out of each day for no reason other than to preserve some pointless skeuomorphism! ↩︎

One possible solution if you really want to see it on your Watch is to tap on the covered date to open the Calendar app, then tap on the back button in the top left to display the month view, which has the date highlighted. Let’s be honest though, this is a terrible solution. ↩︎

I’m not sure why they didn’t just make the flower the icon – perhaps because it’s too similar to the Photos icon? ↩︎

I should note that for my day job I work as a support engineer at SmartThings, so I know a lot about the system. I don’t think this impacts my opinion on these watchOS apps though. It seems clear to me that both Apple’s and SmartThings’ apps for watchOS bring different things to the table, and each is lacking in areas where the other excels. ↩︎

I suppose this is likely a similar transition that Apple watchers witnessed for iOS throughout the last decade, but 9 years ago was a bit before my time of paying rapt attention to Apple’s movements, so I missed out on the youngest few years of iOS. ↩︎