watchOS 6: The MacStories Review

With last year’s release of the Apple Watch Series 4, it felt as though Apple had finally reached a point of equilibrium on the hardware side of the device. The Series 4 brought the first physical redesign, thinning the Watch out and stretching its slightly larger screen to the corners. It packed a processor that finally felt overpowered rather than underpowered, and it kept the Apple Watch’s all-day battery life going strong. The update rounded out with added health sensors for ECGs, background heart monitoring, Bluetooth 5 support, and a new speaker system. Those advancements joined the cellular capabilities from the Series 3, and have now been joined by the always-on display of the Series 5. I’m running out of feature requests for the Apple Watch.

The hardware may now be in place, but as we all know hardware is only part of the story. On the software side, the Apple Watch found its footing two years ago, but had a lot of catching up to do to reach the level of maturity of its hardware. Iteration is Apple’s specialty, and their increasingly strong understanding of the Apple Watch’s purpose has made the software path clear. Last year’s watchOS 5 brought significant fitness and audio improvements, the addition of web content and more interactive notifications. This year’s update brings us even more.

watchOS 6 flew under the radar at the packed and exciting WWDC keynote this June. It isn’t the most flashy update, but the Apple Watch had enough flashy updates in its early years to last a while longer. This is a year for iteration, and Apple has been iterating on all cylinders. watchOS 6 is a quiet giant, adding or redesigning more first-party apps at once than we’ve seen in years, dropping the largest batch of new watch faces since watchOS 1, providing a new way to track fitness over time, and kicking off a nascent foray into Apple Watch independence. Let’s see how Apple did.

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First-Party Apps

As has grown traditional with new watchOS releases, watchOS 6 debuts a handful of first-party Apple Watch apps, some unique to the smartwatch and others making the leap from iOS. watchOS 6 goes hard on this note. Noise and Cycle Tracking make their debuts into the Apple Watch’s repertoire of health tools. Voice Memos, Audiobooks, and Calculator are minor but welcome additions with iOS counterparts. Now Playing has finally found a home, and Find People lets you creep on your friends’ homes. App Store on the Apple Watch plants the first flag of freedom as the device claims independent ground.

Noise

With the Noise app, available for the Series 4 Apple Watch and later, Apple is adding another new health feature which only makes sense on a wearable device. iPhones spend much of their lives tucked away in pockets or purses, but a watch is much closer to the action and rarely covered by much more than a sleeve. This makes it the ideal candidate to monitor ambient decibel levels and make you aware when your environment puts you at risk of hearing damage.

The Noise app is about as straightforward as it gets. It opens to a single-page view with the top half housing a live decibel monitor and the bottom half indicating the long-term safety of this noise level. The top section is not interactive, but you can tap on the bottom section to get a static page of text lightly explaining the intricacies of hearing damage. This page notes that ambient noise levels below 80 decibels should be safe for your ear no matter how long your exposure is. From there, it describes how long you can safely be exposed to increasing volume levels, starting at 80 decibels (can cause temporary hearing loss at 5 and a half hours each day or 40 hours in a week) and rising to 100 decibels (temporary hearing loss at just a few minutes each day or 20 minutes in a week).

You don’t need to read the entire page to understand your current environment’s effect on your hearing. The Noise app will surface the relevant block of text in its main view when you are being exposed to sound at a given volume. You also don’t need to actively open Noise; in watchOS 6 the Apple Watch will periodically check ambient noise levels in the background. When the Watch detects a potentially dangerous decibel level, it will tap you with a notification to make sure you’re aware of how long you can be exposed before temporary hearing loss may occur.

The Noise app supports a watch face complication, so if you want to manually monitor ambient noise levels around you then you can do so at a glance. I’ve been sporting this complication on my watch face on and off while testing the beta, and have actually found myself enjoying it. The complication is simple, looks interesting, and conveys all of the relevant information from the Noise app in an extremely compact package. I don’t often frequent loud environments, but for those who do I imagine this complication could be a great way to keep a more consistent eye on that information. The monitoring happens in the background whether you have the complication or not, so notifications of risky environments will come through even if you don’t want to spend a complication slot on Noise.

My only gripe with the Noise app is that it does not currently support monitoring the volume of headphones. While I’m not usually in an area where ambient volume is elevated, I do often turn up my headphones and would love to be alerted if I accidentally turn them up too much. Interestingly, the new Health app in iOS 13 actually does monitor headphone noise level, but this data is not connected to the watchOS Noise app nor its notification alerts. This seems like a miss to me, and I hope in the future Apple integrates these two data sources. In the mean time, if you have iOS 13 installed you can at least check the Health app to see if your average headphone volume has been too high for the day, week, month, or year.

Noise joins Heart and ECG as quintessential examples of simple apps solving complex problems in ways that only make sense in a wearable device context. This app will automatically surface actionable data to millions of people, potentially helping them avoid impending hearing damage which they otherwise may not have been expecting. This is the kind of solution that makes the Apple Watch truly shine.

Cycle Tracking

Menstrual health is an area not often acknowledged by tech companies, but this year Apple is recognizing it with the Cycle Tracking app. Cycle Tracking links up with the iOS Health app and enables logging menstrual cycle data over time. As data is aggregated, Health can begin predicting periods and fertile windows, delivering notifications so that you can be prepared.

The first time you open Cycle Tracking it will tell you to go enable it from Health on your iPhone. Given this year’s trend toward Apple Watch independence, it’s curious to me that Cycle Tracking isn’t able to flip the necessary flags to enable itself directly from the Watch. It feels outdated to open a new app for the first time and be greeted by a text-only screen saying to open a different app on your iPhone. The reason seems to be that Cycle Tracking requires going through an on-boarding flow in the Health app, but I don’t see why that flow couldn’t be translated onto the Apple Watch itself. Regardless, to get started you’ll need to jump over to your iPhone and pick Cycle Tracking from the Browse tab in the Health app, then go through the screens requesting various information that the app will use to begin analyzing your data.

Once you’ve finished setting things up in Health you can return to the Cycle Tracking app on watchOS, where you’ll gain access to its actual interface. As we’re coming to expect from Apple’s first-party watchOS apps, the UI is simple and straightforward. Along the top runs a timeline tracking historical and (eventually, once enough data is collected) predicted periods. Tapping the current day or a past one will mark a period and allow you to enter additional information about it.

Those are the basics of the Cycle Tracking app, but I’m not qualified to go over the specifics. For that, I’ll point you to Lory Gil’s great in-depth overview of it on iMore. Note that her overview was written earlier on in the beta cycle, so it’s possible there are some small differences between it and the shipped version.

I’m glad Apple is addressing this far-too-often ignored segment of the market. The Apple Watch is a health device, and cycle tracking is an important aspect of health for women. I hope and expect to see Apple continue to keep women’s health on the roadmap in the future.

Voice Memos

Voice Memos for watchOS is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. The app opens to a single page view with a large red record button consuming the top half of the screen. Below the record button is a list of recent voice memos that you’ve recorded on your Apple Watch. Voice memos recorded on other devices are not synced over to the Apple Watch, but those recorded via the watchOS app are synced everywhere else.

Tapping the record button begins the recording of a new voice memo through your Apple Watch’s onboard microphone. On the Series 4 Apple Watch I’ve found the microphone to do an excellent job of clearly picking up my voice, though your mileage may vary if you’re running an older device. Your voice will of course be recorded more loudly if you speak directly into the Watch, but I found that precaution unnecessary. My Watch clearly recorded me no matter what orientation or distance I held my wrist at.

The record screen consists of a large circle with a red square stop button on the top half, and a timer on the bottom half displaying how long the recording has been under way. Nothing on this screen is interactive except the square, which will stop the recording when tapped. I wouldn’t expect anything more from this interface.

[Update]: In an earlier version of this review I criticized Voice Memos for not indicating an active recording session outside of the Voice Memos app, which made it possible to accidentally record your surroundings. Apple fixed this in the public release of watchOS 6: there is now a small white microphone icon that shows up on all watch faces for the duration of active Voice Memos recordings. As I mentioned originally, I was pretty sure this was an oversight that would be quickly fixed. I’m happy to see that Apple was very much on top of the problem.

Once you end a recording in Voice Memos you’ll be taken back to the main screen. To edit, delete, or listen to the recording just tap it in the list (your most recent will be at the top). This will take you to a playback interface where you can tap play to listen to the recording through your Apple Watch’s speakers. As far as I can tell, Bluetooth audio devices like AirPods cannot be used to listen back to voice memos on the Watch. Spinning the Digital Crown will adjust the speaker volume output, and the playback screen allows skipping forward or back by 15 second intervals.

At the top of the screen you can tap on the recording name to change it, inputting a new one via Scribble or Dictation. At the bottom of the playback screen is a strange “…” button. Tapping it brings up a full screen display explaining that your recording will be permanently erased, with a large Delete button at the bottom. Since there are no other options, I’m unsure why the button isn’t just a trash can. Or why the text makes it look like tapping the “…” was some sort of clear indication that you wanted to delete the recording. Perhaps Apple is planning to add more options here in the future.

That’s it for watchOS Voice Memos. It’s a great and convenient addition which gets its job done well. If you’re recording memos frequently, you can add the complication for the app to your watch face for easy access. Right now it’s just a static complication, but it would be really nice to see it animate while a recording session is active (the Workouts complication sets this precedent: it shows its character running during an active workout).

Audiobooks

The Apple Watch Audiobooks app allows listening to audiobooks that you’ve purchased through the iOS Books app directly on your Apple Watch. I haven’t been an audiobooks listener before now, so when I first opened the new watchOS app I was greeted by a page telling me to add an audiobook from the iOS Watch app on my iPhone. The Audiobooks section of the Watch app in turn sent me to the iOS Books app to buy my first audiobook. I purchased one called Red Rising, then returned to the iOS Watch app after it had downloaded.

Somewhat infuriatingly, the Watch app failed to recognize the addition of the new audiobook even though I had downloaded it and begun to listen in the Books app. Watch continued to inform me that I needed to go purchase an audiobook for the rest of that day. Restarting both apps and hard restarting my iPhone and Watch did not improve the situation. I even tried purchasing an audiobook directly from the main page of the Books app that the Watch app was linking me to rather than changing tabs and searching for an audiobook I was more interested in. That didn’t work, but I do now own A Tale of Two Cities because it was available for $1.99.1

It wasn’t until I gave up and revisited the situation a few days later that the Watch app finally recognized my new audiobook additions. My best guess is that an overnight sync was required, but regardless it was not a good look for the app. My tests for this app were conducted two weeks before the public watchOS 6 and iOS 13 release, so while this could certainly be chalked up to the beta cycle, they’re cutting it very close for getting it fixed.

Once the iOS Watch app has successfully identified the presence of audiobooks on your system, you gain access to the settings for the watchOS Audiobooks app. These settings let you determine which audiobooks you want synced to your Watch. By default the “Reading Now” and “Want to Read” options are enabled, both of which correspond to categories in the iOS Books app. When you start listening to an audiobook on iOS it is automatically added to “Reading Now” and synced to your Apple Watch. You can also manually mark various books as “Want to Read” via the “…” icon under them in the Library tab of iOS Books. Specific audiobooks can be manually added via the iOS Watch app’s settings screen, but I think the defaults will be what most people are looking for.

In the ideal case, downloading audiobooks on iOS will result in them being happily ready for you when you look for them on your Apple Watch. Hopefully most users won’t need to mess with the above settings at all, but if you have the same troubles that I did then you may need to take a peek. Once your audiobooks are successfully synced to your Apple Watch, you’re ready to put the new Audiobooks app to work.

Audiobooks uses a very similar interface to Music and Podcasts on the Apple Watch. The main view has a few buttons at the top labeled On iPhone, Now Playing, and Library. Below these is a list of vertically scrolling cards showing each audiobook that is downloaded to your Watch. Tapping on one of these cards will start playing the book if you have a valid audio output device connected. If no audio device is currently connected then you’ll be prompted to connect one; for me that means putting my AirPods in if I tap a card while I’m not wearing them.

The Library button will open a list view of audiobooks that are available on your Apple Watch. Tapping a book from the list will start playing it in the same manner as tapping a card from the main view. If you currently have a book playing or you recently paused one then the Now Playing button will open the Now Playing screen where you can control playback. If you aren’t currently listening to a book then the Now Playing button will not exist.

The On iPhone button is very different from the others. It will open a list of audiobooks that are available on your iPhone, but not necessarily downloaded to your Apple Watch. Choosing an option from this list will not start playback from your Watch, but rather from your iPhone itself. This will transition the Now Playing screen to control your iPhone’s playback rather than your Apple Watch’s. If you’re wearing AirPods and are in range of both your iPhone and your Watch, this distinction should be seamless. Running playback through your iPhone or directly from your Apple Watch will result in an audiobook playing in your AirPods either way.

The main issue I ran into when switching back and forth between my iPhone and Apple Watch as a source for playback was that the sync state of my audiobook was imperfect. If I listened for a while on my phone and then tried to pause it and switch immediately over to my Watch, the Watch would be quite a bit behind. It seems as though the position syncing is happening at various intervals of time, and starting playback from the other source does not prompt it to update to the most recent position. I thought this may be a way to save battery on the Watch, but the same problem presented when trying to switch playback between my iPhone and iPad via the iOS Books app. If I waited overnight then things would be synced up by morning, but for immediate transitions I had to find my place manually. It seems to me that Apple’s audiobook sync service is not nearly as robust as it should be.

Once you have playback going in the watchOS Audiobooks app, you’ll be taken to the Audiobooks Now Playing screen. This interface includes a large central play/pause button with more buttons on either side to skip backward or forward by 15 seconds. Above these are the chapter, author, and title of the book. Below the playback controls are buttons to change the audio output device, navigate between chapters, and adjust the playback speed. Speed can be cycled from as slow as three quarters speed to as high as double speed, with quarter intervals between each option.

Audiobooks seems simple, but I found myself confused at times by how it tries to play fast and loose with audio sourcing between Watch and iPhone. If Apple could make playback position syncing more seamless then this would be much less of a problem. Beyond that, my biggest gripe is that Audiobooks does not translate the skip commands from my AirPods into 15 second skips. I have one of my AirPods set to skip backwards on a double tap, and Audiobooks takes this command literally. Any time I do that gesture I am taken back to the beginning of the chapter I’m currently listening to, which is a terrible experience since I lose my playback position within that chapter entirely. I don’t see why anyone would not want that command to translate to a 15 second skip in this context. Most podcast apps do this already, although Apple’s own Podcasts app also skips chapters here instead of seconds (I think they should change that too).

The new Audiobooks app will be a great way to listen to audiobooks when you are detached from your iPhone. Since I’m not often in that situation, I just ended up always using the On iPhone playback option. This solved my position sync problems by not requiring the sync at all, although the terrible syncing between my iPhone and iPad continues to haunt me. If you do need to find your place again, the chapter navigation view works well to move quickly throughout a book. Audiobooks will store 5 hours of audio from your active book. If you need to listen to more than that, Audiobooks will stream further content over Wi-Fi or cellular when requested.

Calculator

Calculator was an unexpected standout for me in watchOS 6. It’s extremely simple, super fast, and includes the most well designed tip calculating functionality that I’ve come across. I’ve never been one to bother with tip calculators before, but I tried hosting the Calculator complication on my watch face for a while and found myself calculating tips for the first time ever. Also, I really like the look of the icon for the expanded circle-style complication slots on my Infograph watch face.

The Calculator app is made up of two interfaces, one for the calculator and one for tips. The former is a calculator at its most simple; if you need more advanced mathematical functionality then either pull out your phone or use a third-party alternative.2 In the top row of buttons you’ll find one labeled “TIP” which will slide the tips interface down from the top of the screen. This view will take your active calculation and assess a tip percentage on it. The default is 20%, but you can spin the Digital Crown to increase or decrease it. The app will persist your selected percentage across reboots.

The tip percentage button displays the calculated tip next to the selected percent, and at the very bottom of the interface the total is displayed. These numbers update automatically as you spin the Crown to cycle percentages. If you’re splitting the bill with multiple people you can tap on the “People” button to change focus to it, then spin the Digital Crown to add or subtract. When more than one person is selected, an extra “each” value with the divided total is shown below the total. Your selection for number of people is pleasantly not persisted across restarts like your tip percentage is, a nice touch.

That’s all there is to Calculator, and I love it. If you’ve never been a convert to a watch-sized calculator app before, I’d recommend giving this one a try as a complication if you have the space. I’ve found it consistently convenient and enjoy its highly distilled interface.

Now Playing

The Now Playing app has been fully redesigned and now sits as an actual app on the Home screen rather than an ephemeral window that can be accessed from a complication. Now Playing connects to multiple sources that you may have nearby, including HomePods and Apple TVs. Each available source is listed as a card which you can select to control its output. If you open Now Playing from the complication or from an activity indicator dot on your watch face, you’ll skip the card interface and go directly to the familiar control screen.

The HomePod controls are identical to the music controls for Apple Watch or iPhone sources, and all of these allow toggling shuffle and repeat, or picking a different song from the active playlist. The Apple TV control screen is more advanced though. In the bottom left corner is a remote icon, and tapping that will activate an Apple TV remote interface directly on your Apple Watch. The first time you open it you’ll have to type a passcode that your Apple TV will show in order to get access. After you’ve done that once you’ll get access right away in future attempts. The remote interface turns the face of your Apple Watch into the touch surface of the Apple TV remote, with the TV and Menu buttons in the bottom corners. Unfortunately the Siri button is not available, so there’s no way to interact with your Apple TV’s Siri via your watch.

I like seeing the Apple TV remote built so deeply into watchOS. It’s a much more natural place to have that capability than an iPhone, as the Watch is always close at hand when the remote itself is not. I like the Now Playing app a lot, especially because in practice the added complexity has never been an annoyance. It’s hidden away unless I need it, at which point a tap on the blue back arrow at the top left will reveal the card interface.

Making Now Playing an app puts an end to its weird journey through the operating system. Now Playing began its life directly accessible via a swipe up from the bottom of the watch face. This was the most valuable real estate on the Watch other than the face itself. Once Control Center stole its prized spot, Now Playing was relegated to the ephemeral state. It could be found from a complication or from the most accurate of taps on those minuscule activity indicator dots. If the right settings were enabled, it would appear automatically when audio was playing assuming the audio app didn’t supply its own interface. Now Playing could be found in the Dock, but not on the Home screen. With watchOS 6, Now Playing has finally achieved the station it has always deserved.

Find People

The Find Friends app has been rebranded to Find People in watchOS 6. This is to match iOS 13’s new Find My app, which combines Find My Friends and Find My iPhone into a single redesigned entity. The watchOS version does not support finding devices, so Apple has specified “People” to keep the app’s abilities obvious. The icon for Find People is identical to its Find My companion.

Find People opens up to a list of all people with whom you share your location or vice versa. If they are sharing with you, you’ll see the city they’re in and their distance from you listed on their card. If the user is not sharing with you, the card will simply state that they can see your own location.

Tap a card to open a details view which includes a map showing the person’s precise location. Below the map are options to open their contact, get directions to them, set up notifications based on their movement or on your own, and to stop sharing your location with them if you currently are.

Back on the main interface, scroll to the bottom and tap your own card to see your current location, including its name and the device you are transmitting it from. You can’t edit the name or the transmission sources from here – you’ll need to open up Find My on your iPhone to do that. On this screen in Find People you can also toggle whether your location is currently being shared, choose whether to accept requests for new friends to follow your location, and set your preferred metric for distance (miles or kilometers).

The last option on Find People’s main screen is a button at the very bottom labeled “Share My Location.” Tap this to get a screen of input options: voice, contacts, and phone number. The first allows you to speak a name or other identifying information to your Watch, which will search your contacts and return matching results. Pick a result to start sharing your location with them. The contacts option does the same thing, except you have to scroll manually through your contacts list to find who you’re looking for. The phone number option lets you input an arbitrary number to share with, no contact required. Once you’ve selected a contact or input a number, you can choose to share for one hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely.

The Find People app has nearly all the people-related features that Find My does on iOS, which is a trend that I’m really enjoying in the first-party watchOS offerings. Apple’s finding ways to squeeze a surprising amount of complexity out of these apps without ruining the simplicity of their more common use cases. Most of the time when you open Find People you’ll just be looking for an already-shared friend’s current location, and the app has this information very much at the ready. However, if you do need to add a new friend or stop sharing your location, you can still access these more complicated functions by digging just a bit further into the app.

While we’re on this note, Siri has also been updated in watchOS 6 to support finding people’s locations for you. Just ask Siri “where’s [insert friend’s name]?” and it will tap into Find People to make it happen, assuming their location is currently shared with you.

Reminders

The watchOS Reminders app has been updated to match the new Reminders changes in iOS 13. It now opens to a series of cards: Today, Scheduled, All, Flagged, and then one for each custom list that you have created. Lists can only be created on iOS.

At the bottom of the cards is a button to add a new reminder. Strangely, this button will only add a reminder to the topmost of your custom lists. If you want to change it you’ll need to open the iOS app and reorder a different list to the top. I don’t much see the reason behind this, because tapping that button takes you to an almost entirely blank interface except for three buttons to choose how you want to input the reminder text (the usual Dictation, Scribble, or emoji). Apple could very easily add another button there to select a different list for the incoming reminder.

As it stands, if you want to add a reminder to a particular list then you have to find and open the list first, then scroll to the bottom to fine the button for adding something new to it. You can also Force Touch on the screen to activate the hidden contextual menu, from which you can add a new reminder or show previously completed reminders from the list. Force Touch also works on the main screen of Reminders, but it will simply add to your topmost list just like the button at the bottom.

That’s about all you can do in the new Reminders app (as well as, of course, actually toggling reminders as done or not). This app is one of the few that may actually be oversimplified. It definitely handles the common cases for why people would be opening Reminders on their Watch, but it doesn’t hide extra depth if you need it like Find People does. Still, I’m glad to see Apple updating the app to match the iOS redesign rather than letting it grow outdated.

App Store

The last time a new app store was a headlining feature in an Apple operating system update was four years ago on the Apple TV. The tvOS App Store introduced a whole new third-party app ecosystem, and one which ultimately did not really pan out. A year later, Apple shifted focus from third-party apps to their own “TV” app, trying to make it the center of the Apple TV story. The result is a story that still feels confused.

The Apple Watch App Store is different. watchOS fought these battles years ago, and its app ecosystem is already fairly settled in. The new App Store app does not change the paradigm of third-party software on the Apple Watch in any way. Instead, it provides a bridge for the existing paradigm to become accessible without the crutch of an iPhone for assistance. This is the same thread of independence that is reiterated throughout much of watchOS 6.

The App Store app is even more feature-rich than I expected it to be. Its interface opens to a Today view very similar to that of its iOS counterpart. A scrollable list of featured apps and collections are shown. The collections do not come with stories like they do on iOS, but they provide access to the details page of a variety of handpicked apps which can fulfill the featured purpose.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of this view you’ll find a button labeled Account. Tapping it advances you to a screen that shows your Apple ID’s email, and options to see your purchased apps and a list of available updates to apps loaded on your device. The purchased list is searchable by Dictation or Scribble, and it links to the details view of each app you’ve downloaded which supports the Apple Watch.

The details view itself includes essentially all of the information that the iOS App Store’s detail views contain. You can see star ratings, age appropriateness ratings, the developer’s description, the developer themselves (which includes links to their other apps), version history, size, category, device compatibility, supported languages, privacy policies, and user reviews. You’ll also of course find a horizontally scrolling list of screenshots from the app. From the top of the screen you can choose to purchase or download new apps, or reinstall old deleted ones. If an app is already downloaded then the button at the top will open it.

The final piece of the App Store app is the search feature, which is available from the top of the main view. Searching can be done through Dictation or Scribble, and works as expected.

There’s not much more to say about the App Store, but I mean that as a compliment. It’s simple, yet covers everything you’d need it to. If you’ve used the App Store on iOS then the watchOS version will be instantly familiar. It accomplishes exactly what it sets out to, and I have no complaints or ideas for improvement.

The App Store will probably go untouched by most current Apple Watch users, but its presence here is important. As more apps have support added to run on watchOS only, and as more pieces fall into place for an Apple Watch to exist separately from an iPhone, the App Store will be a bulwark on which its independence is built.

Health and Fitness

The Noise and Cycle Tracking apps which we’ve already discussed contribute a large portion of the watchOS 6 health and fitness story. Beyond these, watchOS 6 also brings support for new background activity tracking and Activity Trends.

Activity Trends is a new way to visualize your activity over time, graphing your last 90 days of activity against your last 365 days across a variety of metrics. Trend arrows for each metric will point up or down to indicate whether your current 90 day period is improving or declining compared to your average performance over the last year. Goals are also displayed for each metric to give you more actionable information than the binary arrows. Activity Trends draws all of its data from the Apple Watch, but its interface is only available in the iOS 13 Activity app.

Since Activity Trends is not directly a feature of watchOS 6, I covered it in a separate article this summer. If you’re interested in how Apple is evolving its Activity tracking story then I encourage you to check that out to get a deep dive on the feature. I’ll just give a bit more color to the greater ideas behind it here.

Activity Trends signifies a shift in Apple’s view of its own activity metrics. Before now we’ve only been able to track our daily streaks of activity ring completion. While this is a great metric, it’s never told the full story. Some days we double rings while other days we barely meet the base goal, but these significant alterations would both count for the same degree of success. Activity Trends shows that Apple understands this discrepancy and is exploring ways to resolve it. While the rings are still being tracked as always, Trends give us a more nuanced view into our activity over time than the ring system has been able to.

Trends’ rolling 365 day window of comparison accounts for the often cyclical nature of our activity and fitness. Some parts of the year we may be more active than others, and this is normal and shouldn’t necessarily be disappointing. While Trends may show a downward arrow to indicate a less active time of year, the algorithmically generated goal it displays should inform us that we’re doing alright as long as we’re still getting a healthy amount of activity in (“healthy” used in its literal sense here; you don’t need to be breaking your records but you should at least be on the move to some degree throughout the year). As a nice touch, the trend arrow will point upward even if we’re just maintaining our average activity rather than improving it, so it isn’t necessary to constantly be increasing activity across all metrics all the time.

Activity Trends metrics gather data from the Apple Watch, including a new Stand Minutes metric which is brand new in watchOS 6. Anyone who wears an Apple Watch is likely aware of the Stand activity ring, which counts how many hours of the day during which you have stood for at least one minute. This metric is nice, but the story it tells is incomplete. If you spend an entire hour standing then you won’t get any more recognition than if you had stood for just 60 seconds. The Stand Minutes metric changes this by tracking the actual number of minutes stood in each hour rather than just noting whether it was at least one.

Stand Minutes is not going to be an official activity ring, but it will be a metric tracked in Activity Trends. Since Trends is only available in the iOS Activity app, there’s no way to monitor your Stand Minutes directly on your Apple Watch. In a year where watchOS independence is a hallmark of the release, adding a big new feature which aggregates Apple Watch data but isn’t actually available on the Watch feels like a weird miss. I hope to see Activity Trends make its way to watchOS in the near future.

Watch Faces

A watchOS release would be incomplete without a handful of new watch faces, and watchOS 6 is no exception. This year’s update adds nine new faces to the mix, the most we’ve seen since the round that debuted on the original Apple Watch. I find most of the new options to be fatally flawed in one way or another, but there are definitely a few gems among the bunch. With so few good faces to choose from, every well-designed new challenger that approaches is a huge bonus.

Gradient

The Gradient face is not interesting. It is just like the kaleidoscope face, except this one is a plain gradient background that you can’t do weird things with. Gradient includes more options than it has any right to: you can select how many lines of gradient there are, you can pick the color of your gradient from a set of 62 colors 3 (also four multicolored options, most of which are terrible), and you can choose whether to obscure the entire screen with blinding gradience or just an interior circle. If you choose the circle then you get to add up to four complications around the borders.

If you’re someone who for some reason likes the full screen style of the Color face then maybe the Gradient face will make your face choices more interesting (see below for a sad comparison). Otherwise, it’s a boring face made more boring by forcing all complications to be color-matched.

Honestly I think I like the Color face better.

If you have a weird thing for gradients, this is the watch face you’ve been waiting for!

Numerals Duo and Numerals Mono

At first I thought Apple might be going for an accessibility angle with these additions to the Numerals family of watch faces. Both of these faces show a giant digital time across the entire face of the Watch, with Numerals Duo including the minutes while Numerals Mono shows only the current hour. For Apple Watch users with poor eyesight, this may be a good way to make the current time as easy to read as possible. After more consideration though, I don’t really think this is the case. The X-Large face serves the same purpose, but actually displays the hours and minutes in an extremely clean and readable font. These new Numerals faces use an excessively thick and curved font which I don’t actually think is easy to read for certain characters.

Without even being a good option for accessibility, there’s very little here with these faces. You have the option to display the giant numbers in standard Arabic, Arabic Indic, or Devanagari formats. Numerals Mono also supports Roman numeral format, in case next time someone calls it the “iPhone Ex” you want to show them your watch and ask whether they also think it’s “ex o’clock.” Got ‘em!4 I don’t know why these options are a thing, but here we are.

You can change the style of the numerals to be either filled in or just an outline,5 and you can set the color using the same huge color list as Gradient (go with Papaya). Neither of these watch faces support complications, so don’t expect any useful information to exist around the edges of your illegible numbers.

Pride Analog and Pride Digital 2019

The Pride faces are a ton of fun. Both consist of a series of rainbow colored lines which will gleefully writhe amongst each other whenever you tap them or spin the Digital Crown. The effect looks incredibly cool, and is really enjoyable to play around with. Sadly, the complication options on both faces are terrible, and Pride Digital has so little contrast as to be almost illegible. Apple has snatched defeat from the jaws of watch face victory once again.

Pride Digital came out last year as just “Pride,” but has been updated with a new “2019” version and renamed to “Digital” to account for the introduction of Pride Analog. The Pride Digital watch face supports two complications, which I don’t think is nearly enough for a digital-style watch face. This problem is shared with several of the older digital faces, and I’ve been complaining about it for years now. We’ve seen Apple add more complications on a few faces, but I think there should be even more. The space is there, why not use it?

It gets worse though, because the Pride Digital complications are text-style, and that text is overlaid directly on top of the rainbow lines. This makes both complications almost entirely illegible without really concentrating. The digital time itself is also overlaid on the lines, and while its bigger font somewhat improves legibility, it’s still far more difficult to parse than it should be. This face fundamentally fails to perform its most basic operation. If the lines weren’t so fun to play with, it would be downright offensive.

With the above said, the Pride Digital face does have something other than its cool lines going for it. Last year’s “2018” style is still available as an option in the customization settings, but it has received a few updates of its own. Pride Digital 2018 collapses its lines into six distinct columns. The columns fade out at the top and bottom, and tapping them or spinning the Digital Crown makes them explode into the crazily moving individual lines that the default face is fully composed from. Last year’s version of this face would just black the screen out and have the lines animate back in each time you tapped it, and spinning the Digital Crown had no effect. The new animations are far more fluid and delightful.

The benefit of using thick lines separated by thick black bars is that the legibility of the time and complications on the 2018 variety of Pride Digital is significantly improved. I actually think this face looks pretty great, and may be a legitimate option if you want a simple look. Personally I want more than two complications, and I also really dislike the text-style complication in general. It requires you to read a whole line of text to get the same amount of information that the more compact complication styles provide at a glance. Bad complications eliminate Pride Digital 2018 from the running for me, but it’s still a beautiful face with an awesome effect (the lines actually jiggle a bit every time you raise your wrist, so you get a consistent hint of the fun without having to manually make it happen). If you care less about complications than I do then this might be a fun option.

The Pride Analog face has a similar line pattern to Pride Digital 2019, but it doesn’t ruin everything by putting non-contrasting text directly on top of it. If you don’t want any complications at all, Pride Analog can be set to consume the entire screen like Gradient and many other options. While I never like the absence of all complications, I have to admit that Pride Analog’s rainbow lines look fantastic when filling up the whole screen on a Series 4 Apple Watch. Spinning the crown makes them go absolutely insane, undulating all over the place in a truly fascinating manner. I also love that every time your screen turns off, the next time you look at it the order of the colors has shifted (this is not the case for Pride Digital).

Pride Analog also supports a collapsed style where its lines only occupy a circular area. This allows four complications to be placed around the edges of the pattern. Unfortunately, the complications are of the most compact possible circular style, which means they’re minuscule and nearly unreadable on a 40mm Apple Watch. I don’t understand why Apple is still making new watch faces that use this style of complication, because last year’s Series 4 Apple Watch introduced a far better style which actually utilizes the increased screen real estate of the new device. Pride Analog’s eschewance of modernity here is disappointing.

On top of the bad complication styles, Pride Analog also color-matches the complications to whichever color is at the edge of the circle on each wrist raise. Legibility-wise, some colors make it a lot easier than others. When the complications show up in red, orange, or purple I find it really hard to parse them. Blue, green, and yellow are a lot easier to read, but the inconsistency pushes me to never rely on them. If your preferred set of complications are all just app launchers which don’t directly display information on the watch face, this might not an issue for you.

I wish Pride Analog would allow me to not color-match the complications at all. I generally don’t prefer color-matched complications on any watch faces (although the new Meridian face is a notable exception). The uniformity removes any ability for the icons to be distinct from each other, making it difficult to quickly parse which is which. I assume Apple does this because it thinks that matching the color with the rest of the face makes the complications fit in better, but in my opinion it also reduces the distinctiveness of the face. Apple should add an option on every face to allow complications to display in their developers’ chosen color schemes; being concerned about option-overload pretty much went out the window when they added 62 different color choices.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on Pride Analog, but I just can’t help but imagine what this watch face could have been. In an alternate timeline, Pride Analog always fills the full screen, but adding complications results in the line pattern flowing around their borders. I could particularly see a set of central complications in the style of the new Meridian face (we’ll get to this below) or the Infograph face. I haven’t mocked this up so maybe it wouldn’t look as good as I think it would, but either way I’m certain that there exists some way to style this face which doesn’t use a complication layout from watchOS 1.

My qualms aside, both Pride varieties do include that immaculate animation. If your complication preferences aren’t as…complicated as mine then one of these faces might find a home on your wrist. Just please not Pride Digital 2019.

California Dial

The California Dial face is an interesting option. Its full-screen variety is easily one of the best looking watch faces available. In my opinion it looks so good that I might even consider using it as a “special occasion” face. If I have an event that I want to look my best for, California Dial is the first face I might bother to pull out as a finishing touch. For me, this requires switching to the “pills” option for the tick marks, as I find the Roman, California, and Arabic styles to be too busy. There’s also Arabic Indic and Devanagari, which both actually look pretty good if that’s your thing.

Full-screen California Dial allows two complications slots. I like to see both the digital time and the date on my analog watch faces, so both slots are taken by those defaults for me. The result looks amazing though, particularly with the default Navy Blue color option. Cream looks pretty great too, but feels excessively bright at night. You can also go with Black and then pick from the standard set of colors for the markings, but I think there are better options for a black background watch face (like Infograph). If you’re using a Series 5 Apple Watch, the colored versions will revert to black when the screen is inactive.

While California Dial looks incredible across the full screen, its complications are too sparse to be my daily watch face. California Dial supports the option to reduce it to a circle and open the corners for complications, but I don’t think this looks nearly as good as full screen. Switching to circular also removes both of the central complications. The corner ones are thankfully the modern Series 4-style complications, so they make great use of space and are nice and readable instead of the tiny compressed circles that Activity Analog uses. I wish they weren’t color-matched to the rest of the face, though.

There’s also a fifth complication supported around the outer rim of the dial when the face is set to its circle style. This text-style complication shows up at the top of the circle. Due to the color matching, if you have complications in either top corner I find it becomes difficult to parse the differences from all the same-colored text and symbols.

If you can get by with the two complications in fullscreen mode, California Dial might be what you’re looking for. If you’re giving its circular version a look, Infograph is probably a better option. Finally, if you like the expanded version but can forsake its excellent deep blue background, Meridian is a better way to go. California Dial is almost great, but I think its lunch is being eaten by other faces with fewer drawbacks.

Solar Dial

Solar Graph (that’s Graph, not Dial) is a classic watch face6 which doesn’t offer much in the ways of complications or customizations, but it is one of the nicest looking digital faces available. You can spin the Digital Crown to get a fun animation of where the sun will be throughout the day, including sunrise and sunset times. With watchOS 6, Apple is introducing a new addition to the Solar family: Solar Dial.

This new face has a similar underlying gimmick to Solar Graph: spin the Digital Crown and watch the dial spin around and animate the position of the sun. This animation shows the earth and the sky, and as the sun moves the sky changes from dark to light and back again. Solar Dial takes sunrise and sunset times to the extreme, showing astronomical dawn and twilight; nautical dawn, dusk, and twilight; civil dawn, dusk, and twilight; and sunrise and sunset. I don’t know what any of these mean, and prefer the simplicity of Solar Graph’s unadorned dawn, twilight, sunrise, day, sunset, dusk, night timeline. That said, I’m sure there are people out there who will appreciate Solar Dial’s specificity.7

Beyond the animations, Solar Dial is just a really nice looking watch face. It supports four corner complications of the modern and spacious Series 4 variety. Its center dial area can be set to either an analog or digital time. I use the digital time, and appreciate that the time is never obscured as the face rotates throughout the day.8

Where Solar Dial falls down for me is that I don’t really like its bright blue look during the day. As the dial changes color with the sky, its unfortunately color-matched complications change as well. I don’t think the result looks as good as other faces during the daytime, but I think it looks incredible with its dark blue hues at night. The complications are highly readable with that color scheme, so the color matching doesn’t even bother me much then. I suppose the solution is obvious: day watch face and night watch face.

In all seriousness, I think Solar Dial is a pretty solid option that is worth your consideration. It’s ultimately not for me, but it really looks great at night.

Modular Compact

Modular Compact is an odd new face. It supports both analog and digital time, but places them within a clock that takes up only around a third of the screen. The clock is located in the top right, and along its left side are two of the expanded circular complications. Across the bottom is a single large complication which stretches to both edges.

I’ve never been a big fan of these largest of complication styles, but they are able to provide a significant amount of information at a glance. This watch face feels designed for those who require one of those large complications, but also like an analog time. It seems to me that if you want to use the digital time version of this watch face, you’re better off just using the standard Modular face. Modular supports a digital time only, but is less space constrained by not having to place those digits within a giant circle. That trade off allows it to have four circular complications rather than Modular Compact’s two, while also still including a large edge-to-edge complication in the middle.

For its analog version, I think Modular Compact actually looks quite good. It also supports the Series 5’s transition from white face plate to black for its clock to save power. You can choose to have a constantly black face plate as well, and set the color of your complications to something other than their multicolored defaults. While it isn’t really my style, Modular Compact is a well-designed addition to the lineup which I think may find a solid niche.

Meridian

Added late in the beta cycle – only after the Apple Watch Series 5 was announced – Meridian is a gorgeous sight. The face displays analog tick marks around the very edges of the screen, ringing four circular complications within its center. It is the expanded California Dial design, but without the wasted central space or the ugly tick mark style options. Meridian’s complications are the expanded, spacious type of circular ones. They’re big enough to display information and icons readably, unlike the constricted corner circles I’ve criticized above.

Meridian is restrained in its options, almost to a fault. I’d love to see this face atop the striking blue background of California Dial’s default. Unfortunately, we only get to pick between a white background and a black one. Despite this, the white Meridian is quite striking itself. The black option is a bit plainer, and I’d take Infograph’s black over this one. Meridian’s black was built to conserve power while the always-on Apple Watch Series 5 lies dormant. Raising your wrist with that device would bring the brilliant white bursting back to the screen. If the white is too bright though, Meridian’s black can be set as your constant option.

Beyond the two face plate colors, Meridian allows choosing a color scheme for its complications. I’m pleased to see that the top option allows complications to be multicolored, which means they get to use their own color schemes. As I’ve already noted above, there are other watch faces that I think would greatly benefit from this exact option. I’m unsure why Apple keeps it confined to Meridian alone, and I hope we will see it spread in the future.

Surprising myself, I actually find the matching color options to look better upon Meridian’s clean white faceplate. I think the face’s extreme simplicity makes the matching colors feel more at home than they do elsewhere. This will of course be highly dependent on your personal complication choices and color preferences. For mine, I find the Hibiscus color the most striking against Meridian’s white (sorry, Papaya).

My one lingering complaint lies in the watch hands, which continue to obscure Meridian’s complications periodically throughout the day. I would almost rather remove the hands entirely, leaving the digital time at the top to tell it, while keeping the surrounding tick marks just for show. It would be better if Apple could come up with a way to just fix this problem with clever UI.

Meridian is one of my favorite watch faces overall, and an excellent addition to the lineup. It’s only available on the Series 4 Watch and later, but if you have one of these then you should certainly give it a look. It seems like a particularly strong contender for the Series 5, where its nice transitions between white and black can come into play.

No Changes to the Siri Watch Face

For the past few years it’s felt like Apple was gearing up for the Siri watch face to be a huge part of the watchOS story. The face was introduced as a major new feature in watchOS 4 and received significant attention in watchOS 5. Last year Apple was pushing third-parties to integrate with the face and investing in its machine learning capabilities. As I discussed in my watchOS 4 review and reiterated in my watchOS 5 review, the promise of the Siri face was great but the implementation was far from functional.

The Siri face’s machine learning has historically been highly ineffective for me, but the idea of a watch face that intelligently surfaces the data you’re looking for at the time you’re looking for it is incredible. If machine learning could successfully execute that ideal then it would be an amazing solution to the difficulty of navigating an operating system on such a tiny screen. I criticized Apple in the past for hyping up the Siri face when it was so clearly not ready to live up to its own pitch, but I’ve also repeated that I believed in the idea. My expectation has been that Apple would continue pushing forward until it got this right, but this year it looks like they may have given up the ghost.

watchOS 6 doesn’t seem to include any change to the Siri watch face whatsoever. The absence of apparent development work on this two-time headlining feature feels conspicuous to me. It’s only one year off right now, so we could still see the Siri face picked back up next year, but perhaps Apple is finally admitting defeat on its unsuccessful machine learning digression.

I hope that’s not the case, but as I’ve stated before, I’ve never really felt like the Siri watch face was solving the problem in the right way. If it truly lived up to its expectations then the Siri face would sanitize the Apple Watch experience. Everyone would have to use it or else sacrifice major functionality. While I think machine learning could be a huge boon to the Watch, I want to see Apple focus those efforts on complications.

One of the reasons I constantly gripe about watch faces with few complications is that I think complications have the potential to be an integral part of the Apple Watch experience. Rather than us picking static complications for static watch faces, I think we should pick a face and perhaps a set of complications, and the face should then intelligently surface complications at valid times.

I’m under no impression that this is an easy ask. To pull this off properly would be extremely hard, but I think there are some simple steps that wouldn’t be too difficult. For instance, if I have a Now Playing complication on my watch face, but nothing is playing, that complication should just be cycled out for something else that may actually be useful. As it stands, the Now Playing complication just shows the words “Tap To Open” when nothing is playing, and tapping that opens a screen with a link to open the Music app. By the simplest of logic we could automatically swap Now Playing out for a complication that directly opens the Music app, but I think Apple could do even more than that in this area.

The Siri face may not have been exactly what I was looking for machine learning-wise, but I’ve been pleased the last couple years to see that Apple was at least hard at work on something related. I’m disappointed to see no such sign this time around, but we can hope that work is underway for a big machine learning update which just couldn’t get done in time this year.

A Brief Interlude to Shower Infograph with Praises

I wasn’t able to touch on the Infograph watch face in my watchOS 5 review last year because it was only included on the Series 4 Apple Watch, which wasn’t yet released at the time of the review. I discussed it theoretically in my Apple Watch Series 4 overview, and thought it had great potential. Since then I bought a Series 4 and got my hands on Infograph. Even though it was really a watchOS 4 feature, I can’t go without touching on it in an official review.

The Infograph watch face is spectacular. It’s highly customizable with up to eight complications, but does not color-match so each one can have its own distinct look. Apple’s promotions all showed Infograph’s eye-catching white face plate, but I love the plain black with white tick marks. The face is extremely simple and gets out of the way, but looks really nice and lets me round things out with interesting complications. It supports three compact circular complications in the center, plus a fourth that can be circular or text or both. Around the edges are four of the modern Series 4-style corner complications which I’ve been lauding throughout this review.

I’ve been running Infograph for almost a year now and I haven’t looked back. Utility,9 my previous favorite, looks like a dinosaur in the age of Infograph. Sadly the face is only available on the Series 4 Watch and later, but if you’re running a Series 3 or earlier and feeling the watch face woes, just know that there’s light at the end of the tunnel when the time eventually comes to upgrade again.

Siri

MacStories Adorable

The Siri watch face may not have seen any love this year, but Siri itself has gained a couple new abilities in watchOS 6. First, your Apple Watch can now listen to ambient noise and determine what song is playing in the background. This is a feature that has been on the iPhone and iPad for years now, but wasn’t previously available directly from the Apple Watch. Now you can ask your Watch “What song is this?” and it will listen for a bit before making a determination. Be aware when you try this: if your connected iPhone is currently playing a song – or was paused directly before you queried Siri – then the Apple Watch will just announce what the iPhone is playing. If you aren’t wearing headphones then that announcement will be loud and public through your Watch’s speakers (the speakers will be used even if you have your Apple Watch muted). As long as you aren’t currently playing your own song though, your Watch will listen momentarily and then silently display the song that it believes has been playing around you. In my testing it has worked every time, although I haven’t been in particularly noisy environments for those tests.

The second and final new Siri feature in watchOS 6 is the ability to scroll through web search results. In earlier versions Siri would just tell you to look at your iPhone if it didn’t know the answer to a question. Now it will search the web just like it does on iOS, and will display the list of results for you to scroll through. As of watchOS 5, web content is viewable directly on the Watch, but until now there wasn’t much use for that beyond receiving messages that had links in them. Now the new Siri search results will all include buttons to open the associated links, loading the web pages up in watchOS’ browser. Obviously searching the web is still far from optimal on such a tiny screen, but the fact that it’s a lot more easily accessible when necessary is another step forward for the Apple Watch’s independence.

SwiftUI and Independent watchOS Apps

We won’t be diving too deeply into technical details here, but two new features for developers in watchOS 6 have big implications for the entire ecosystem of third-party Apple Watch apps.

SwiftUI is a new way of defining interfaces for watchOS apps, and it’s a huge deal. Not only does SwiftUI greatly simplify and streamline interface building, it also makes more complex interfaces much more accessible to developers. SwiftUI interfaces can be live previewed, so developers no longer need to execute the slow build-and-run dance on their Apple Watches (far slower and more finicky than building and running iOS apps during development) every time they want to test a UI tweak.

The slowness and complexity of watchOS interface development has been a huge time drain for watchOS developers. SwiftUI should improve that, and the result will hopefully be fewer developers giving up on their watchOS apps and more developers going the extra mile to polish their UIs. I expect SwiftUI to open the doors to animations, interactive elements, and generally more advanced and capable apps for watchOS.

The other huge new ability for third-party watchOS apps is independence. Before watchOS 6 the only way for a watchOS app to be downloaded was for its companion iOS app to also be downloaded onto the connected iPhone. This year that changes. A series of new APIs enables developers to ship watchOS apps on their own, with no home on the iOS mothership.

In the general case this change will not be the biggest deal, but it’s the beginning of something bigger. Third-party apps can adopt these APIs without cutting away their iOS companions, meaning the changes are not restrictive. Apps that have no place anywhere other than the Watch can now be built only for the Watch, but apps that should exist in both places may still benefit from independence as well.

Independent Apple Watch apps harken back to the idea of “universal” iOS apps – those which build on both iPhone and iPad via the same singular codebase. Apple Watch apps aren’t part of the “universal” qualification quite yet, but perhaps in the future they will be. The ability for an app to exist on its own is freeing for the Apple Watch as a product more than the individual apps. This is one of the most necessary steps toward Apple Watch transcending its current position as a lowly iPhone counterpart.

It will take some time for developers to start implementing watchOS app independence and building apps with SwiftUI. The initial set of capabilities is not yet even feature complete, meaning it isn’t currently possible for some apps to make the leap. I’m not too worried about this. The path forward is clear, and in the coming years there’s no doubt that Apple will continue expanding these APIs until they encompass every function a watchOS app can offer.

watchOS app independence will have little to no user impact this year. It’s still not even possible to activate an Apple Watch without an iPhone, so having apps run only on the Watch provides little benefit beyond conserving memory on the phone. The importance of this change will come down the line. Apple is giving developers a head start here, so when true independence does come they’ll have had the option to be ready.

Miscellany

Alongside all the major changes, every watchOS release also includes a host of small tweaks and additions sprinkled throughout the system. This year’s update brings Animoji stickers to the watchOS Messages app. Animoji stickers are new in iOS 13, offering the Animoji (or Memoji) faces frozen and adorned with various emotive ornaments such as heart or star eyes, tears, blown minds, or just emotional faces. In watchOS Messages you can tap the emoji button to find any Animoji stickers that you’ve recently used interspersed with recently used normal emoji at the top of the interface. Scroll down to find a grid of all existing Animoji, and tap one to pick from its various sticker styles. Memoji stickers are for some reason not currently present in the grid of all Animoji, but if you’ve recently used a Memoji sticker on iOS then you can find it either in the recent grid at the top, or from the “More Stickers” button all the way at the very bottom.

A new accessibility setting allows you to set your Apple Watch to chime at the top of each hour. The chime schedule is configurable, so you can also set up chimes to go off at 15 or 30 minutes intervals. For the chime sounds, you can select either bells or birds. Chimes are configurable directly on the Apple Watch in the Accessibility section of the Settings app, but can also be set up on the iOS Watch app.

If silent mode is disabled on your Apple Watch, you can now tap and hold the watch face with two fingers to hear the device speak the current time out loud through its speakers. This feature is not configurable in Settings, but it won’t happen if your Watch is on silent.

For the first time, we can reorder our watch faces directly from the Apple Watch itself. I always found it a bit strange that we couldn’t do this already, so it’s a welcome addition and another reason to never need to open the Watch app on iOS.

watchOS 6 includes quite a few new first-party complications that you may be interested in using on your watch face. Additions are a slightly updated Date complication,10 Audiobooks, Calculator, Cellular Connectivity (this used to be strangely restricted to the Explorer watch face, but is now open to the rest of the line), Cycle Tracking, Noise, Wind, Rain, and Voice Memos.

You can now delete a small subset of first-party Apple Watch apps off of your Watch by long-pressing an app from Grid view. This set has not yet grown as large as it is on iOS, but it includes Alarms, Timer, Stopwatch, ECG, Noise, Breathe, Now Playing, Radio, Cycle Tracking, and Camera. If you really want to save space or reduce the clutter on the still-not-redesigned watchOS Home screen, deleting some of these will help if you never plan on using them.

The Workout app has added a new current elevation metric for Outdoor Run, Outdoor Walk, Outdoor Cycle, and Hiking workout types. It also now allows access to the repeat and shuffle settings for music directly from the Now Playing screen at the right of the main interface for active workouts. Tap the playlist icon in the bottom center of Now Playing to enable or disable these options.

Conclusion

watchOS 6 is one of the more subtle updates we’ve encountered over the last five years of Apple Watch, but that subtlety should not be mistaken for insignificance. The user-facing updates in watchOS 6 may not be the most exciting we’ve seen, but their skillful execution makes it clear that Apple understands the device it has created. Nearly every first-party watchOS app is well crafted and properly honed down to its simplest ideas. New health updates expand use cases for the Apple Watch’s most important category of features. Only a few new watch faces manage to pass my very high bar, but continuing to throw options at the wall every year is exactly what Apple should be doing; by now we’re starting to see quite a few diamonds among the rough.

For the first time ever, a subset of third-party apps can exist independent of their iOS counterparts. The vision is far from fully realized, but this year is a start that will be continued in the years to come. It won’t be long before every relevant watchOS API which requires an attached iPhone has been freed from its restrictions. Break the chains!

Apple has shown its hand this year, revealing future plans for Apple Watch independence without directly announcing them. In the years to come there’s no doubt that the Watch will sever its ties to the iPhone much like the iPhone once severed its ties to the Mac. As an independent product, the Apple Watch could become a new gateway to Apple’s ecosystem. It could even be the catalyst of a new halo effect if users of other smartphones were able to dip their toes in the Apple waters via the world’s most popular smartwatch. Right now the Apple Watch is only available to the fraction of the world which owns iPhones. To be truly freed from that greatest of restrictions would reveal the device to masses of potential new customers.

There is much work yet to do. watchOS 6 is far from the end of the Apple Watch’s quest for independence. But it is the beginning.

I somehow avoided reading A Tale of Two Cities in high school, but it comes for us all at some point. ↩

PCalc is excellent and has a great Apple Watch app if you want access to more than the basics from your wrist. Personally I find it a bit overbearing for my 40mm needs, but it's lightning fast (in my tests, PCalc is somehow launching even faster than Calculator on the Apple Watch) and feature rich if you're looking for something more. ↩

That's right, I counted them. Judged them too. Even the six extras they tried to sneak past me in the GM build. Here's some hot color tips: if you're looking for pink, go for Dragon Fruit. Don't be fooled by Electric Pink, it's actually orange. Cocoa is a lie, it's clearly gray. Use Beryl at your peril. I don't know what's going on with Mellow Yellow, but it's wrong. Whoever named Mist Blue needs to see an eye doctor. Papaya is perfect. ↩

Even a broken joke is right twice a day. ↩

As we've recently discovered, the outline styles exist to save power on the Series 5's always-on face. ↩

It was one of the original batch of watch faces way back in watchOS 1, which as far as the Apple Watch goes is deserving of the "classic" moniker. ↩

Okay I'm not actually sure, but, probably? ↩

I still don't understand why five years later we still have complications on "analog" watch faces obscured by the hands throughout the day. Interface-wise this is not a trivial problem to solve, but it's certainly doable in some ugly ways and I believe Apple could find an elegant solution. If they can't, I'd still prefer an ugly way over dealing with the date sometimes being covered when I want to look at it. ↩

Another classic watch face! ↩

I still find Better Day superior in most cases, with the notable exception of the expanded circle-style complications you'll find in the center of faces like Infograph and Meridian. Better day insists on small text with a spinner indicating the day of the month for this style, which I find ugly and hard to read. The first-party Date complication simply gives the day of the week and date of month, exactly what I want. On all other complication styles though I prefer Better Day. ↩