watchOS 11: The MacStories Review

After years of steady, iterative updates to watchOS, last year, Apple dropped one of their most significant releases in years with watchOS 10. The design language was updated for all of their first-party apps, watch faces were upgraded to take full advantage of the larger screens on current models, and the Smart Stack was introduced to make glanceable information much easier to access. To make way for the Smart Stack, Apple also reassigned the Digital Crown and side button to new functions. These changes, along with the usual updates for health and fitness, made for a release that every Apple Watch user took note of.

The awkward recalibrating of muscle memory aside (I still very occasionally swipe up on my watch face to try and reveal the Control Center), it was an excellent update. My only worry coming out of it was that Apple would dust off their hands, reassign lots of their talent to something else, and go back to the usual, iterative, health- and fitness-focused updates with watchOS 11.

Thankfully, that was far from the case. Not only has Apple made some solid updates to the Apple Watch hardware line this year, but they’ve also enhanced and added to the software in ways that signal they are far from done.

The question is, are these changes going to enhance your daily use of Apple’s most personal device, or are they just, well, changes?

I’m excited to dive into this question in my first watchOS review for MacStories, but before I do, I want to thank Alex for his years of excellent watchOS coverage. I hope I can live up to the standards he set.

Right, let’s do this.

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[table_of_contents]

Smart Stack

Last year, when the Smart Stack was introduced alongside hardware button reassignments in watchOS 10, the new interface’s many potential benefits were often lost amongst the various discussions over whether Apple should have changed the button functionality in the first place. And despite its name, daily usage of the Smart Stack didn’t really feel all that “smart.”

Part of me wonders if that was all deliberate. Now, one year out, the latest additions to the Smart Stack can be recognized for what they are: genuinely solid enhancements that actually make the Smart Stack live up to its “smart” name. Let’s see how these new features stack up. (Sorry.)

Live Activities

Live Activities are a great feature on iOS, but their glanceability depends on you having your iPhone on your person. So it feels only natural to bring them to the Apple Watch, a device that is literally attached to your body. Thankfully, this is one of those times Apple has channeled Steve Jobs’ famous phrase and Live Activities “just work.”

Rather than taking an app’s Lock Screen Live Activity from iOS and cramming it into a widget in the Smart Stack, watchOS uses the detail contained in a Live Activity’s Dynamic Island. It then displays this information in a slightly tweaked version of the Dynamic Island that also includes the app’s name.

Live Activities ‘just work’ by taking existing information from the Dynamic Island on the iPhone.

The great thing about this approach is that developers don’t need to write a single line of additional code. They don’t even need to offer an Apple Watch app; watchOS mirrors what’s in the iPhone’s Dynamic Island and shows it in the Smart Stack. During a session, Live Activities will show temporary updates (like a change in your food delivery status) before switching back to the Dynamic Island data. If you are currently using an app on your Apple Watch, the update will appear as a small banner at the bottom of the screen, which you can either tap on to launch the Live Activity or dismiss.

This is a fantastic way of bringing the Smart Stack to the Apple Watch, and watchOS offers more customization, both for users and app developers.

Developers aren’t limited to mirroring the Dynamic Island in their watchOS Live Activities; they can create richer versions more in line with their Lock Screen Live Activities using only a few lines of code. They can also add buttons for actions like pausing audio content. Apple encourages developers to only use one button in Live Activities on the Apple Watch, but that recommendation doesn’t seem to be an enforced rule, so it will be interesting to see what developers do with this new functionality.

From a user perspective, the way Live Activities activate has also been well thought out. Launching a Live Activity on your iPhone will automatically launch the Smart Stack on your Apple Watch with the Live Activity at the top. This includes the Now Playing Live Activity, which appears rather than the full-screen player from previous years.

At first, this might seem annoying. The Smart Stack launches every time I have a Live Activity on my iPhone? Will I ever see my watch face again? Mercifully, in the Watch app on iOS, you can fully customize each app’s Live Activity behavior. You can have it auto-launch the Smart Stack, appear quietly in the Smart Stack for when you choose to bring it up, or not appear at all.

One of the first things I’d recommend every user do after updating to watchOS 11 is go down your list of apps and specify your preferences. Unfortunately, this is where you’ll butt up against a frustrating limitation of this feature: you need to go through every app one by one. If you’re someone who has a lot of apps on your iPhone – so, everyone – this will take some time.

Setting Live Activity settings for the Apple Watch. It takes a while so get comfy.

Ideally, there would be a toggle at the top of the app list to turn all Live Activities off; then, you would be able to turn on the subset you want to use and specify how you want them to work.

If you tap on a Live Activity in watchOS, one of two things will happen. If the app is installed on your Apple Watch, it will launch. If the app is not installed, a full-screen alert will appear that includes a button to open the app on your iPhone. Tapping it will automatically open the app on your phone – after you authenticate, of course.

One final thing to note is that these Live Activities don’t work when your Apple Watch isn’t connected to your iPhone. This hasn’t been an issue for me yet; I suspect it rarely will be.

Except for the time-consuming list of settings in the Watch app, the introduction of Live Activities on the Apple Watch is exceptional. The way it all “just works” while offering a high level of customization for each app is very well thought out. I’ve found a lot of use in having Live Activities like my food orders, sports scores, and multiple simultaneous cooking timers easily glanceable on my wrist. I know I won’t be the only one.

Suggested Widgets

For the past year, the Smart Stack was supposed to be suggesting widgets for things like an upcoming meeting or reminders that hadn’t been completed. This was originally touted as a machine learning feature, and while it did periodically work for me, it felt half-baked. In watchOS 11, Apple has doubled down on this capability with suggested widgets.

This feature uses data like time and date, location, sleep schedule, music detection, Activity ring status, rain alerts, and more to suggest widgets in your Smart Stack. “Suggest” may be too gentle a term for what it does, though, as the widgets are literally added to your Smart Stack, sometimes right at the top.

Widget suggestions are, for the most part, useful.

After spending a lot of time last year carefully picking the widgets I liked and in which order I wanted them, I initially found this feature a bit chaotic. I had several pinned widgets in my Smart Stack, and suggested widgets are never allowed to appear above pinned ones. So I was getting several widget suggestions, but they were three or more widgets deep, which meant I never took advantage of them.

To properly test this feature, I unpinned all of my widgets and deleted a couple I didn’t need. That’s when I started to see the real benefit of suggested widgets. There are countless examples of times I looked at my Smart Stack at a particular moment and what appeared at the top was very relevant to me. To list just a few of them:

When I leave home, a Home app widget appears, showing me the status of devices in my house and, crucially, if any contact sensors on my windows and doors are open.

When I wake up, the Smart Stack always shows me a sleep widget displaying my sleep data from the night before and a weather widget with the current conditions.

If I have a meeting coming up soon, a Calendar widget with that event will be visible.

After a workout, the Smart Stack shows my Activity rings at the top of the stack.

Another convenient widget suggestion is meant to occur when the Apple Watch detects music playing prominently in your environment. In response, it will supposedly add the Music Recognition (also known as Shazam) widget to the Smart Stack. (You will need to give your permission to enable automatic music detection.)

The Music detection widget should automatically appear when music is playing.

I say “supposedly” because I can’t for the life of me get this to work. I’ve tried playing music on my MacBook, putting on vinyl records, and even checking it while at a gig – all to no avail. Here’s hoping it works better for others.

When the Smart Stack makes widget suggestions, they’re not always perfect. For instance, it occasionally adds a Home widget with my ‘Goodnight’ scene at around 7:00 pm, way before I should be in bed. Those occasional errors notwithstanding, widget suggestions work very well.

As with Live Activities, suggested widgets are enhanced by the ability to customize how each widget might be suggested. You can turn off suggestions for an app completely or specify the types of widgets the Smart Stack can suggest for a particular app. To give you an example, in the Home app’s settings, you can individually define whether to allow it to suggest accessories, scenes, controls, electricity usage, and electricity rates.

Refining your preferences for widget suggestions is even more time consuming and fiddly than Live Activities.

Unfortunately, as with Live Activities, there is no way to toggle all apps on or off (though you can turn the entire feature off with a toggle). To make matters worse, the controls are only available in the Settings app on the Apple Watch itself, not in the Watch app on iOS. This makes for a very fiddly and time-consuming experience when refining your setup.

Nevertheless, suggested widgets are another impressive addition to the Smart Stack. The level of granular control is particularly welcome. Apple could have just added this feature and let it run wild, but the company is allowing users to drill down into each app’s settings to precisely control suggestions, which is to be commended. After getting over my initial confusion about the feature, I’ve found it to add welcome contextualized information to my daily life.

Interactive Widgets

The enhancement of the Smart Stack continues with the new ability for developers to add interactivity to their widgets. We got a small glimpse of how this works last year with the Timer and Now Playing widgets. They each featured a simple, circular button on one side to start and stop a timer or playback, with a countdown or the currently playing song on the other. If you’ve seen those, you know the basics of how interactive widgets work in watchOS 11.

Interactive widgets are maybe too simple.

The most prominent example of interactive widgets in watchOS 11 is a Home widget that toggles an accessory on or off with a tap of its circular button. This implementation is okay, but it’s too constrained. If you want to control a light, you can turn it on or off, but you can’t specify the tint or color. Even tapping on the widget’s text performs the same action as pressing the button, which almost defeats the point of the layout. To adjust the tint or color of a light, you have to open up the Home app as before and access the setting that way.

A Home app widget to control a scene.

This is a needless way of doing things. Tapping on the text should launch a details panel for the light containing these settings, just like in the Home app on iOS. Additionally, the widget featuring three recent workouts, which launches the selected workout when you tap on it, would make an excellent template for a Home widget layout. It would allow you to add your three favorite scenes or accessories and quickly toggle them on or off.

The new workout widget shows your three most recent workout types.

The term “interactive” is doing a lot of work here: you can technically interact with the widgets, but they really just feature a single button that starts or stops something. As with Live Activities, Apple suggests using only one button per widget in their developer videos. However, I hope we’ll see developers ignore that and create three-button group widgets that take advantage of this new control system. And since widgets can also be dynamically updated, developers could take this even further and make their widgets’ contents change based on user interactions.

Smart Stack Miscellany

The clock at the top of the Smart Stack now appears in the same style and format as your current watch face. It’s a nice touch, but I still believe it wastes space. It would be more efficient to immediately show two widgets when activating the Smart Stack instead of one or allowing room for complications. After all, when you scroll a bit further to show more widgets, the date and time are still displayed at the very top of the screen, so you’re never missing out on that information.

The clock in your Smart Stack changes style to match the watch face.

There are several new system widgets in watchOS 11. The severe weather alert is excellent, as is the one for upcoming rain. I’m not so keen on the Photos widget because it’s so tiny, but it’s there should you want it. There are also widgets for the new Vitals and Translate apps as well as Training Load – but more on them later.

Health and Activity

We all know the story of how Apple changed course with the Apple Watch in the initial years after its launch, focusing more on health and fitness rather than fashion and “personal connections.” Sorry, Digital Touch, you were ahead of your time. Or behind. I can never be sure.

This was once a banner feature of watchOS. Really.

Apple’s commitment to health and fitness with this product has meant yearly enhancements in that area. You needn’t look any further than the number of workout types the Apple Watch now supports for proof of that.

Alongside notifications, my primary use for the Apple Watch is tracking my health; anything new in that area will always catch my eye. While last year’s focus was more on OS design and interactions, watchOS 11 turns its attention back to significant new health and fitness features.

To be fair, there isn’t anything here that hasn’t been seen before in third-party apps or other fitness devices, but Apple has approached them all in a unique way, leaning on the company’s years of experience and even some of the medical studies it has helped facilitate.

First up is a new app that, like many watchOS apps before it, brings together and expands on several capabilities the Apple Watch already has.

Vitals

Apple’s slow and steady march forward with sleep tracking continues again in watchOS 11. Sleep tracking was added four years ago in watchOS 7 with only basic sleep/wake tracking and the ability to schedule a wind down as part of your bedtime routine. Back then, with the Series 6, tracking your sleep was a little challenging to do due to battery limitations – namely, the time it took to charge the device. Getting enough charge before going to sleep meant you had to efficiently plan when to take your watch off for a significant period of time. I remember hearing tales of people buying two watches just so they could track their sleep with one while the other charged.

A year later, the Series 7 was released with fast charging, allowing the battery to charge up to 80% in 45 minutes, and watchOS 8 added respiratory rate tracking during sleep. Now, with fast charging on the Series 10 down to 30 minutes for 80% battery and the addition of sleep apnea detection, there are more compelling reasons than ever to wear your watch to bed. watchOS 11 adds another big one: the new Vitals app.

However, before we get to that, we should note that Apple is making it easier to start tracking your sleep in the first place. In watchOS 10, if you wanted to track your sleep, you had to enable the Sleep Focus on your Apple Watch. Forget to do so and, well, your watch wouldn’t record any metrics (despite some third-party apps being perfectly capable of doing so). Starting with watchOS 11, you don’t need to trigger sleep tracking with a Focus change. Your Apple Watch will leverage its built-in motion sensors and sleep detection algorithms to identify when you fall asleep, allowing you to track your sleep – including naps throughout the day – automatically.

Sleep data in it’s various forms.

I had the terrible task of testing this out by taking several daytime naps this summer (“It’s for my review!” I told my justifiably skeptical wife) and am happy to report that it worked perfectly. I slept with an Apple Watch on each wrist (which, yes, did look ridiculous); one was set to the Sleep Focus, and the other was not. Both watches tracked my sleep within a minute or two of each other every time.

I suspect I’ll continue sleep tracking via the Sleep Focus technique, as I like to have my watch’s screen locked and turned off on a schedule. Still, it’s good to know that, should I pass out on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, my Apple Watch will be able to tell me how much of the afternoon I lost to the land of nod.

There is a downside to automatic sleep detection, and it’s a strange one: when it detects sleep automatically, my Apple Watch never records my wrist temperature or blood oxygen. I have no idea why, but it’s not great, considering the new Vitals app relies heavily on those pieces of data.

The new vitals app is a nice overview of key metrics while you slept.

The Vitals app itself is pretty simple to understand: wear your watch to bed, and it will track your average values for heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. After the first week of use, the Vitals app will establish your typical ranges for each of these metrics. If two or more of those figures ever fall outside your typical range, your Apple Watch will alert you and suggest possible reasons for this discrepancy.

If you use auto-detection for sleep tracking you loose two metrics. If you have a recent Apple Watch in the U.S. that doesn’t support blood oxygen measuring that column is removed completely.

The interesting thing about this new app is that it doesn’t actually measure anything new. All the metrics mentioned above are already available in the Health app on your iPhone. What Apple is doing here is taking the data and putting it together in a way that’s easier to review. In the Health app on iOS, the figures are just dots on a graph; unless you’re an expert, they don’t mean a lot. Showing if a metric is outside your typical range is helpful, and along with an alternative seven-day view of each metric, you can get an idea of what might be affecting the quality of your sleep.

Each metric has a small ‘i’ button that, when tapped, explains its importance and factors that can affect it. Apple claims that the notification algorithm that alerts you of outliers in your vitals is informed by data from the Apple Heart & Movement Study and input from clinical experts.

The info about each metric is very useful and informative.

There’s more to this app than initially meets the eye, with some nice touches but also a couple of glaring absences. Let’s focus on the good stuff first. The information you’re given about each metric and its importance is very useful, and if you’ve never paid attention to these vitals as part of your sleep, it will educate you on what makes a good night’s sleep. Plus, the couple of times my wrist temperature has been shown to be out of range when I wake up, I’ve felt a bit rough later that day, which was interesting to see. One time, I even canceled an evening gym visit based on an alert from the Vitals app, which proved to be the right choice when I started to feel run down later in the afternoon.

Vitals in the Health app.

Still, there are some missteps here that Apple would do well to address. First, healthy sleep is about consistency, and an excellent way to measure that is through the concept of sleep debt. As an example, if you normally sleep 7.5 hours every night except one when you slept sleep 5, you’ll be creating sleep debt that will have to be addressed. Sleep debt would be a much better vital to track in this new app than the somewhat simplified sleep duration.

Second, one common measurement provided by health devices is Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV is based on the amount of time between a person’s heartbeats and how much it varies. A high HRV suggests your body is well rested, you had a good night’s sleep, and you’re primed for a big day or a challenging workout.

This is an incredibly useful metric, and I find it strange that Apple hasn’t included it in the Vitals app, especially since HRV data is already available in the Health app. The only reason I can imagine for its absence is that it sounds like a complicated metric, but if you look anywhere in the Health app on iOS, there are tons of complicated-sounding metrics.

Overall, the Vitals app is a well-intentioned and, to some extent, useful app. There’s certainly room for improvement to make it a truly powerful tool, but if it follows the trajectory of sleep features on the Apple Watch, I suspect watchOS 12 will see an expanded version. If I were a betting man, I’d say that sleep debt tracking will be next on the list.

Training Load

Training load is a common term amongst athletes that measures the impact of exercise on a person’s body over a set period (typically seven days). It’s calculated by measuring the intensity and length of a workout along with the frequency of other workouts. Getting this figure and comparing it to the last 28 days allows you to be better informed about how to train. If your training load score is well below your average for the past 28 days, then you know you need to pick up the pace to push your body a bit more to see results. If it is well above, you might want to dial it back a bit so your body has time to recover and you don’t get injured.

Considering the fact that the Apple Watch has always been firmly aimed at the general consumer, especially when it comes to health and fitness, it’s a big move for Apple to step into this field. Proper training load can be a complex measurement, so in addition to using it in watchOS 11, I had to do a fair amount of research into the subject to fully understand it and how Apple’s approach is unique.

Unsurprisingly, this being a feature from Apple, it’s straightforward to use your workouts to inform training load and log the necessary data. Quite simply, after a workout, all you have to do is rate the effort you feel you put in on a scale of one to ten. Those options are also split into four categories: Easy, Medium, Hard, and All Out. You can enter your rating any time after a workout, and you can also change it later, should you wish. After a cardio workout, the Workout app will even suggest a rating for you based on age, height, weight, GPS, heart rate, and elevation.

Giving your workout an Effort rating straight afterwards or (right) later on.

This effort rating goes toward your training load score for that day, but that’s where things start to get a little murky.

Your effort rating is entirely based on your input (unless you leave the cardio ratings as suggested), so the question has to be asked: is that reliable? There is evidence to suggest people generally get these ratings right. Still, it strikes me as a potentially unreliable approach when other devices from brands like Garmin use metrics to give you a decisive, locked figure.

I’ve found the automatic ratings generated from cardio workouts to be okay, if not a little low compared to how I felt the workout went. However, non-cardio workouts are entirely reliant on my rating. Plus, I need to remember to enter the rating each time, which – I’ll be perfectly honest – doesn’t always happen.

The Training Load feature is a little hidden (top right on in the Activity app). You can also refine by workout type (right).

I have other questions about Apple’s handling of this feature. For instance, there is no way to see a correlation between your workouts, effort ratings, and training load. The system also offers no advice concerning what to do about your training load, whereas third-party apps (such as Athlytic) will tell you whether you’re primed for a big workout or in need of a rest day.

As another example, if a user keeps pushing their workouts to get a higher percentage above their average 28-day training load, taking their training load higher and higher, would they know they need to ease up a bit? If you don’t know what these numbers truly mean, they can be confusing and, in the worst-case scenario, dangerous.

You can also view your training load in the Fitness app on iOS (with your figures from the Vitals app shown just below for comparison), where there is advice on what your percentage means. But is everyone going to look there? When I opened the Fitness app for the first time in iOS 18, the training load card wasn’t even present; I had to add it. I’d like to see Apple better present this potentially great feature and what it means to users.

Training Load in the Fitness app shows more detail and actual advice with what to do with your rating. The Apple Watch app does not.

That said, I have been using training load a lot, and after reading up about what it actually is, I’ve found it to be a good motivator for pushing myself rather than just closing my Activity rings every day. It’s also good that I can go back and adjust my effort rating for a workout later, something other devices don’t allow. This was particularly useful when I went on a long hike for a couple of hours that my Apple Watch rated as a 2. You know what? I felt pretty tired after all that walking, so I was glad to be able to up it to a 6.

This is only the first iteration of training load on the Apple Watch, so I’d like to see a couple of things change next year in watchOS 12. First, your training load figure relies entirely on your effort rating being input after every workout, which you are prompted to do when you end the workout from your Apple Watch. However, if it ends automatically - like with a Fitness+ workout or if you use Siri and don’t look at the screen - it’s easy to forget. If you don’t enter it, then your training load isn’t accurate. While you can go back and scan through the past few workouts to enter a rating, it would be good to have a more reliable reminder to rate a workout after completion, like a notification that stays in your Notification Centre on your iPhone or Apple Watch.

HRV in the Health app (left), in Athlytic (middle), and the recovery rating in Athlytic (right).

Secondly, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is typically used to show readiness for training in the form of a ‘recovery’ percentage. As mentioned in the Vitals section earlier, your Apple Watch already takes HRV readings, and it would be good to combine this information with your training load to give solid advice to users about what sort of workouts would be suitable for their bodies that day.

Training Load is a fascinating addition to the Apple Watch. For the most part, I think it’s a good feature – if you understand it. However, it feels like Apple is holding back a bit with what they could really do here.

That said, what is really fascinating about training load is that it is the first truly “pro” training feature to be added to the Apple Watch. Sure, it’s watered down a bit, but this is a change from Apple’s “close your rings” approach of the past.

So why now? My theory is that the company seems to be having a hard time adding new sensors for things like blood glucose to the Apple Watch, which means it has to focus on adding more value in other places. Extending the capabilities of the Apple Watch into pro-athlete territory does just that, and I hope we see more pushes into this area.

Activity Rings

Let me posit a scenario: someone gets an Apple Watch as part of an effort to get fitter and maybe lose some weight. They’ve heard all about how the Apple Watch can help you get more active by “closing your rings”, so they’ve taken the plunge and brought their all. On the days that they are exercising and closing their rings, they feel great, but not having regularly exercised before, it’s a huge physical and mental challenge to do this every day. Nevertheless, on days they struggle to motivate themselves to work out – or even when they just want to have a day off – their Apple Watch keeps saying things like, “There’s still time to close your rings!” and “Find some time to be active today.”

I’ve created this hypothetical person to help explain how significant the new ability to pause your rings in watchOS 11 truly is. I’ll confess that if I’m having a rest day and don’t intend to close my rings, it doesn’t bother me. But for many people just starting out on their journey with getting fit, being constantly nudged to work out can have a negative effect mentally. Being able to essentially “turn off” your rings for the day is huge for those people and many others.

Let’s be clear: Apple doesn’t deserve massive praise for this. It’s something that we should have been able to do years ago. Nevertheless, I’m delighted it’s here, and of course, it’s very well implemented.

Pausing your Activity rings is very easy.

To pause your rings, tap on your weekly summary in the top-left corner of the Activity app. Then, scroll right to the bottom, and you’ll see two buttons: ‘Change Goals’ (more on that later) and ‘Pause Rings.’ Select ‘Pause Rings,’ and you’ll be presented with four options for pause durations: ‘For Today,’ ‘Until Tuesday,’ (other people seem to get ‘Until Monday’ so it’s a bit unclear what is happening here), until the next month, and ‘Custom.’ The ‘Custom’ option allows you to set the length of your pause in days. Once you’ve made your selection, your Activity rings will turn grey, and all alerts will be disabled. The night before your rings are due to resume, you will get an alert asking if you’re “ready to get back to it,” with the option to extend your pause should you wish to.

The prompt you will receive the night before your Activity rings restart.

It’s a simple option that should have been here before, and now it is. Thankfully, that’s not the culmination of your power over your Activity rings. watchOS 11 also allows you to set a daily schedule for all three rings.

Scrolling down to the bottom of your weekly summary screen and tapping on the ‘Change Goals’ button will bring up your usual daily goal, with the move ring showing first. If you tap the calendar icon in the top right, you can switch to a weekly schedule with different daily targets. This is a much more elegant way to refine your rings’ targets than pausing them altogether. I don’t really get a chance to work out on weekends, so it was great to adjust my ring targets to more reasonable levels for those days. You can also do this in the Fitness app on the iPhone.

Setting a schedule for your Activity rings.

There is one final, relatively hidden change to your Activity rings. If you scroll to one of the rings in the Activity app, you can adjust its target just for that day, and it will snap back to its usual target the next day. Our lives and schedules aren’t always consistent, so this is a nice touch.

The only thing I’d like to see added to this feature is the ability to keep my stand reminders for the day even if I pause my move and exercise rings. Remembering to stand regularly is an impactful way to help reduce cardiovascular problems, improve circulation, and more. I love the stand reminders, as my days can sometimes pass by so quickly, and don’t want to disable them.

Regardless, the other changes here add up to some good enhancements to one of the Apple Watch’s central elements.

Fitness App

The Fitness app on the iPhone last underwent a significant change with the introduction of Apple’s Fitness+ service in December 2020, adding a tab that contains an ever-increasing library of workouts. (The app wasn’t available at all on the iPad until the launch of Fitness+.) I’m a very regular user of the service, using it almost every weekday for cycle, core, and strength workouts. Suffice to say, I’m a big fan.

Apple seems to be, too, since the company adds new workout types, trainers, themed workouts, and more on a very consistent schedule. These service additions aren’t tied to software updates, but iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 do include some improvements to navigating the plethora of workouts. The main change is the addition of a navigation bar along the top of the Fitness+ tab that features four sections: For You, Explore, Library, and search.

For You in Fitness+.

The For You section contains recommendations for workouts you might like based on what you usually do. If you’re new to Fitness+, the app will prompt you to pick activities you might be interested in to help populate this section. Since I stick to cycling, core, and strength workouts, that’s what the app suggests for me. What I like about these suggestions is that they are all workouts I haven’t done before. Too often, I have to search through the Fitness+ library to find a new workout; this speeds the process up. Your favorite trainers are also shown here, as well as your workout history.

The Explore tab in Fitness+.

In the Explore section, you can find new workouts, suggested sections and collections like ‘Get Back to a Routine’ or ‘Yoga for Every Runner,’ and beginner programs to get you started. I don’t really use this because I stick to a similar routine every week, but if you’re new to Fitness+ or have trouble picking workouts, this will be very helpful.

The Library tab is a great overview of what you have already done including custom plans and stacks.

Next is the Library, where you can browse all the workouts, meditations, programs, custom plans, and stacks you have saved. When all Fitness+ content was clumped together in a single tab, your Library was tough to find and navigate because it was much further down the screen and not very well categorized. This redesign makes the Library much easier to access and use.

It’s far easier to search. Kim’s a Hackney girl so always good to hear a local voice.

Finally, there’s search. Under the search bar, this tab includes cards representing different activity types offered in the app as well as a Discover section of collections like ‘Run Your First 5K.’ Tapping on the search bar allows you to search for workouts, trainers, music, and more. Yes, that’s right: workout music is available as searchable metadata in-app. Now, I can look for a workout that includes some AC/DC to get me fired up.

This new four-section organization scheme is most welcome and has helped me find new workouts much more easily than before.

One thing I’d like to see added to Fitness+ is support for custom interval workouts displayed on your watch. Sometimes, getting your iPhone out and doing a full video workout is impossible; maybe you’re at a busy gym, or you don’t have your iPhone nearby. It would be great if you could download a workout with different intervals to your Apple Watch so you could do it anywhere. The Up Next workout view, new in watchOS 11, would work very well with this feature, showing which exercise is next while you perform your current one.

Still, these are all very helpful quality-of-life changes that make Apple’s fitness service easier to use, which I’m really happy to see. While Fitness+ is not perfect, it’s constantly evolving and contains a lot of great workouts and trainers who make keeping active approachable.

As if the layout changes for Fitness+ weren’t enough, the rest of the Fitness app is also getting a significant shakeup this year in the form of customization. Scroll down to the bottom of the Summary tab, and you will see two new buttons: ‘Edit Summary’ and ‘See All Categories.’ Tapping the former will send all the cards in the Summary into “jiggle mode.” From there, you can rearrange their order – except your Activity rings, which stay locked to the top – and add in additional cards like Training Load, trends, friends, Fitness+ recommendations, and more.

Editing the summary in the Fitness app. Jiggle mode included.

As I mentioned before, I primarily do cycling, core, and strength workouts, so I appreciate the ability to add a card for each of those workout types for a quick check-in on my last session. Other cards, like Training Load, are nice to have in the mix, too, but I wish I could shrink or even remove the Activity Rings card. I always have my rings visible on my Apple Watch, and the card takes up almost a third of the screen that could be used for another category summary.

After organizing your perfect layout, you can tap the ‘See All Categories’ button to go to any category, including those you haven’t added to your main summary, and check in on its data.

Like the Fitness+ changes, this new layer of customization makes a meaningful difference to how I use the Fitness app. We will likely never know how successful Fitness+ is in raw numbers, but someone high up at Apple (maybe even early morning workout boy Tim Cook) really likes both the service and the app, and I enjoy seeing them grow. Thanks to the hard work of everyone involved, from the trainers in the videos to the software developers behind the scenes, the Fitness app remains one of Apple’s lowkey success stories.

Pregnancy Tracking

Well, I have a confession to make: I haven’t been able to try any of the new pregnancy features in watchOS 11. I really wanted to, but let’s just say I wasn’t up to the task. Nevertheless, having been through a slightly problematic pregnancy with our daughter (she’s fine now), I welcome any tangible help with things like high heart rates and mental health during and after pregnancy.

If you already use the cycle tracking feature built in to the Health app, you can now add a pregnancy by heading to the pregnancy section and selecting ‘Add a Pregnancy.’ You will then be taken through a setup process, and once you’re finished, the cycle tracking section will be changed to show your gestational age down to the day.

From there, you can add various data points, such as unexpected bleeding and even appetite changes. As usual, Apple never tries to offer medical advice, so when bleeding occurs, the app will prompt you to reach out to a healthcare provider.

Heart rates often increase during pregnancy, so if your high heart rate threshold is lower than 120 bpm, the Health app will notify you to review it. Furthermore, you will be alerted if your walking steadiness decreases during pregnancy.

Pregnancy tracking on iOS and watchOS. Source: Apple.

You also have the option to be reminded more frequently to take a mental health assessment both during and after pregnancy. I think this is an excellent idea. Especially after birth, it’s so difficult to find time to step back and consider your changes in mental health, so being prompted to take stock of how you feel is essential in managing any changes that might come up.

Lastly, you will be able to see the time you were pregnant across all charts within the Health app, and your Medical ID will display your pregnancy along with your due date.

There many great apps available to help you manage or log your pregnancy, but having essential tools like walking steadiness tracking and heart rate notifications built into your Apple Watch is Apple at its pragmatic best.

More Health and Activity Additions

I’m not sure how many different types of sporting activities there are in the world, but surely Apple must be close to adding all of them as workout types on the Apple Watch. I say this because this is the second year in a row the company hasn’t added any new items to its infinitely scrollable list in the Workout app. What it has done is make notable expansions to its existing range of workout types, particularly the outdoor kind.

Route maps have been added to the following workout types: cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, snowboarding, outdoor rowing, and even golf. You can now display distance as an on-screen metric in outdoor hockey, lacrosse, disc sports, outdoor skating, American football, Australian football, rugby, soccer, paddle sports, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, snowboarding, outdoor rowing, and – again – golf.

Custom workouts, a feature of the Workout app I feel people should be talking more about, can now create interval-based workouts for swimming, using haptics to signal when to switch segments. As I mentioned in the Fitness app section, each time you start a custom workout, you will see a new view on the workout screen showing your next interval.

These are all small additions when considered individually, but stepping back and looking at watchOS updates over the last few years, it’s clear that the enhancements to many different sports and activities have been quite astounding. I suspect Apple is far from finished.

OS and Apps

While the Apple Watch dominates its field, it often lags behind its very attached sibling – the iPhone – in gaining the latest apps and features. This year, several additions are coming to watchOS not long after debuting on iOS. Heck, some even arrive this year in tandem with their release on the iPhone.

It’s good to see, and it means there’s plenty to try out when you upgrade to watchOS 11. Let’s take a look.

Watch Faces

There are two new watch faces coming this year. As part of the Apple Watch Series 10 unveiling, Apple announced the Flux and Reflections watch faces. Flux features what the company calls a “bold graphic design” with numbers that take up the whole screen. As the seconds tick by, color fills the screen from the bottom up. It’s nice enough, but maybe on the lower end of the inventive scale.

The new Flux face. Source: Apple.

Then there’s Reflections, which features a simple hand design in front of a metallic-like dial. The gimmick here is that the dial will change and shimmer to imitate real metal as you turn your wrist. This is a clever effect and the first of its kind for the Apple Watch. I’d love to see these sorts of subtle reactions come to more watch faces in the future.

The new Reflection face. Source: Apple.

A few years ago, Apple proudly stated that the Photos face is their most popular watch face. In watchOS 8, the company introduced the Portraits face to take advantage of depth data within your photos, making the subject interact with the digital time. Well, the Portraits watch face is no more, as those features have now been merged into the Photos face, which is also seeing some upgrades.

When you first edit an existing Portraits or Photos watch face, you will be prompted to upgrade to the new Photos face in the Watch app on your iPhone. This is where the creation and editing tools for this watch face now reside. You can keep an existing Portraits watch face intact, which you may wish to do since there are only three very condensed fonts available in the new Photos watch face.

Try to edit your photos face and this is what you’ll get.

You can add up to two text complications to the Photos face and choose whether you want to use just one photo or have your Apple Watch shuffle through several that you specify, just like before.

Creating a new photos face in the Watch app on iOS.

Where this watch face gets its supposed upgrade is the way it chooses how your selection of photos is displayed. You can choose your preferred font and a style (basically, a tint) to be applied, but if you set the time size to ‘Dynamic,’ the position and size of the digital time will change to compliment the subject’s position in the current photo. Apple uses machine learning to do this and claims that if you choose a category of photos to shuffle through, such as ‘People,’ it will select the best pictures based on facial expressions, aesthetics, and composition.

The new Photos watch face gets very mixed results.

When I tried this watch face, it occasionally chose a picture that didn’t fit in – like a picture of me instead of my wife and daughter – or the subject appeared behind the time. It also seems to struggle with landscapes, especially when a tint is applied. But with faces, it works fine, I guess.

Look, I don’t wish to sound down on these watch faces because they are nice. It’s just hard not to feel a bit disappointed with what feels like such a minor update to one popular watch face, along with two subtle new ones. Really, what I want is third-party watch faces, or at least some daring new designs to choose from. Remember last year when we got that incredible Snoopy watch face?

Say goodbye to Numerals, Siri, Chronograph watch faces.

There are actually fewer watch faces in watchOS 11 than before. In addition to Portraits and Photos combining into one watch face, the Siri watch face is gone, as are Explorer, Numerals, and Chronograph (though Chronograph Pro still exists).

For once, it’s all a bit quiet on the watch face front, which is frankly a bit disheartening.

Check In

Check In was introduced last year in iOS 17. I’ve used it quite a few times when cycling home from work as peace of mind for my wife. If I’m not home by the expected time, she will receive a notification to check in with me, along with my location, battery level, and more.

Check In in the Messages app.

watchOS 11 brings the feature to the Messages app for watchOS, the same place it appears on iOS. More importantly, though, Check In has also been added to workouts.

When I start an outdoor cycling workout on my Apple Watch as I head home, I can swipe right on the workout screen to show the controls, then scroll down to tap the Check In button. From there, I can Check In with my wife after a certain amount of time, when I arrive at a specific location, or when my workout ends.

Check In when doing a workout.

The Apple Watch even takes Check In to the next level by adding the ability to let my wife know if my speed dramatically increases or my heart rate drops to an unusually low level. Thankfully, I have not needed these features yet, but I can foresee many people using Check In on a cellular Apple Watch, leaving their iPhone at home, and heading out for a late-night run.

The ability to start a Check In when you’re not connected to your iPhone but have a Wi-Fi or cellular connection is also welcome. Lastly, you can have your Apple Watch remind you to send a Check In to someone every time you start an outdoor workout. This is perfect for when I forget to do so manually, which is about 50% of the time.

Check In is a great feature, but I would still like to see the option to send your live location along with your Check In. My family can, of course, use the Find My app for this, but not everyone wants to share their location with their friends and family all the time, so an option to do so temporarily within Check In would be a good addition.

Hiking Routes

Apple loves talking about – and even raising money for – the U.S. national parks – so much so that they have an annual national park-themed activity challenges to earn special awards. This year, they brought their love of national parks to a new Hiking Routes feature in the Maps app on iOS. You can create your own custom routes, too, but the thousands of built-in hikes you can browse through are all located in U.S. national parks.

Browsing, searching, and viewing a hiking route on iOS.

To be clear, hiking trails and trailheads aren’t new this year, despite what Apple implies. They’ve just been given more prominence and curation.

When viewing a U.S. national park in the maps app on iOS, you can find hikes by bringing up the search bar and typing “Hikes” or by tapping on ‘Hikes’ under the ‘Find Nearby’ section. (This option disappears when looking at locations outside the U.S.) You can also find hikes by tapping on a trailhead on the map and seeing which hikes it is a part of. When you find a hiking route you like, you can then add it to your library and also get directions to its start.

Once you add a route to your library, that’s where the Apple Watch comes in. From the Maps app on your Apple Watch, you can see a route’s duration, length, and elevation. When you are near enough, you can tap ‘Go’ to start turn-by-turn directions with optional voice guidance.

The library is new to the Maps app. This is where you can browse your saved routes.

Details of your route. When you’re nearby just hit go!

It’s also possible to save these routes to your Apple Watch for offline use. This process is not clearly explained, but you need to download the route to your iPhone first. Then, in my experience, the route will sync over whenever my Series 9 darn well feels like it.

This sort of vagueness would be frustrating if I were just about to head out on a hike and wanted to leave my iPhone behind. Why introduce such a great feature and make its setup process so opaque? There should really be a button next to each route in the iOS Maps app that syncs the route to your Apple Watch.

Creating a custom route in the Maps app on iOS. You can do this anywhere in the world, like this random route in New York.

You can also create your own routes on your iPhone by using a trailhead or any landmark as a starting point and then simply tapping around the map. The route will snap to the nearest pedestrian route, such as paths or roads. This is perfect for creating a route for a lovely country walk wherever you are in the world and then leaving your iPhone at home to truly take a break from your online life.

When I was able to download a route to my watch, I enjoyed the experience, even using it once for a cycling route. However, the unreliability of the offline syncing between my iPhone and Apple Watch is disappointing. I’d also like the option to turn a map from a walking workout I’ve previously completed into a saveable route in the Maps app.

Translation

I’m perfectly primed to take advantage of the Translation app’s transition to the Apple Watch: my wife is Spanish, and only a couple of her family members speak English. I also have a three-year-old who is rapidly overtaking my ability to speak the language.

I frequently use the app on iOS to quickly translate a word, tell me how to say a phrase in Spanish, or sometimes have an entire back-and-forth conversation using the Conversation tab. The iOS app is clean, easy to use, and very fast at translating. I’m excited about the watchOS version because it puts the app on my wrist, making it even easier to access.

The Translate app on iOS is excellent.

To be perfectly honest, if you’ve already been using the Translate app on iOS, there isn’t a whole lot more to talk about here. The watchOS version is missing camera translation (unsurprisingly) and the conversation feature. My guess is that Apple thought having two people huddle together over a watch screen might be too much. Otherwise, all the other Translate features are present, including your favorites, which sync between your watch and iPhone.

The Translate app on watchOS is identical to iOS. Just compare with the previous image.

To translate a word or phrase, you simply select the language you speak and the one you want to translate to, then tap the microphone button. (You can change the default input to the on-screen keyboard, should you wish.) When you’re finished speaking, you can tap the stop button or wait a couple of seconds for the app to automatically stop listening. Your translation will appear, and you can tap either language’s version to hear it phonetically or swipe right to add it to your favorites.

If you don’t have headphones connected to your Apple Watch, the translation’s audio will play through the device’s speaker, which I appreciate. I certainly don’t want to have to reach for my AirPods anytime I want to hear a Spanish phrase.

The Translate app comes with a final touch I appreciate, and it involves the Smart Stack. When you travel to another country, the Smart Stack will suggest the Translate widget automatically, giving you handy access to the appropriate translation you might need.

The Translate widget (left), and the suggested widget when you travel to another country. It’s a great touch.

Writing this section was hilariously straightforward because the Translate app is just the iOS version running on the Apple Watch. But let me be clear: this isn’t a dig at Apple in any way. The Translate app on the iPhone works brilliantly; now, it also works brilliantly on the Apple Watch. Job well done.

Additional OS Features

Ultra Wideband Home Keys

Up to this point, a home key on the Apple Watch has allowed you to use the device’s NFC chip to unlock supported smart door locks by tapping them. In watchOS 11, you can now leverage the Apple Watch’s Ultra Wideband chip to unlock doors hands-free as you approach.

This sounds great, but there’s a twist: no door locks currently support this feature, and none will until the release of a standard called Aliro in 2025. So great job, Apple, for getting ahead of the game, but this isn’t anything to get too excited about just yet – especially when we can’t see how reliably it will work. (For an explanation of Aliro and this possibly tactical move by Apple, check out this video from Eric Welander.)

Enhanced Ticketing

This is another feature that I haven’t been able to test and won’t be able to until companies start rolling it out. Enhanced ticketing allows issuers to add much more information to tickets in your watchOS wallet.

This feature, also launching on iOS, can include extra information like an event guide, directions to parking, venue open and start times, and more.

As with many new features this year, the Smart Stack also has a role to play: a Live Activity for an event will start when you arrive at its location so you can quickly get information like your seat number. This all sounds great, but no one has rolled this out yet, so its usefulness remains to be seen.

Indian Script Support

There is now support for showing the time in a variety of Indian scripts on certain watch faces. The nine Indian scripts are Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, and Telugu. These can be used in three different languages (Burmese, Khmer, Urdu) and are supported on the Astronomy, California, Memoji, Modular, Modular Duo, Modular Compact, Utility, World Time, and X-Large watch faces.

Maybe it’s because I’m used to staring at boring western numerals every day but these look beautiful.

I’m not fluent in any of these languages whatsoever, but having used scripts like these in design materials before, I must say that they are very nicely crafted.

Double Tap

The Double Tap feature introduced in watchOS 10 is now more functional. You can use it to scroll through almost any app, such as the Activity app with its various screens or a third-party app like CARROT. This feature is automatically available in all apps, but developers can also take advantage of a new Double Tap API to control specific parts of their apps. I’ve been testing a few apps that have done so, which I’ve featured in the Tidbits and Extras chapter.

This is one of those accessibility features that will hugely benefit users with limited mobility as well as regular users like myself. I hope to see it expand even further in the coming years with more functionality – maybe a tap-and-hold gesture, or even a triple tap.

Tidbits and Extras

Small Tweaks and Tidbits

One of the fun parts of any OS release is spotting the smaller tweaks and extras. They can be fun, helpful, or potentially even annoying, no matter their seemingly trivial nature.

This year is no different, with many interesting tidbits scattered across watchOS 11.

Swimming workouts will now display the water temperature if you’re wearing an Apple Watch Series 10 or Apple Watch Ultra 2 .

The new AirPods Pro 2 hands-free gestures on iOS – which let you say yes with a nod or no with a head shake – also work with automatic workout prompts on the Apple Watch. Nice.

When you are in the Sleep Focus and want to unlock your Apple Watch, you only need to press the Digital Crown instead of holding it down for a few seconds like in watchOS 10.

Similarly, if you have the water lock on, you only need to hold down the Digital Crown for about one second to turn it off, as opposed to around three seconds in watchOS 10.

The small Now Playing icon that appears at the top of the watch face now gently pulsates when media is playing and stops when it’s paused.

Full-screen notifications now have a subtle fade-in and scale-up effect.

Scrolling down with the Digital Crown from the watch face will now pull your notifications down from the top of the screen.

watchOS 11 includes the ability to change the system ringtone and set separate ringtones for different apps like Calendar and Reminders.

The new Quick Switch menu on the Apple Watch Ultra will be a favourite for Ultra fans. The new stopwatch (left) and timer (right) apps.

When you start multiple timers, they appear as widget-shaped tiles in the Timers app. Previously, you had to swipe through full-screen timers; having them in a scrollable list is much better for access and glanceability. It also enables you to quickly swipe to delete each one. Each timer also shows up as a widget in the Smart Stack.

The Stopwatch app’s white background has been replaced with a black one that’s easier on the eyes.

The Action button on the Apple Watch Ultra has a useful new feature: holding it down brings up the Quick Switch menu, allowing you to quickly reassign it without going into the Settings app. You can adjust the options shown in the Quick Switch menu in Settings.

Tap to Cash, the feature announced for the iPhone that allows you to transfer money by tapping two devices together, is also available on the Apple Watch.

The new Remote app (left and right) and the only part of Apple Intelligence coming to watchOS: notification summaries.

The Remote app for your Apple TV gains the ability to control the power and volume, as well as use Siri hold-to-talk.

While the Apple Watch will not get any Apple Intelligence features for the foreseeable future, it will be able to mirror summarised notifications from the iPhone when Apple Intelligence launches with iOS 18.1.

Third-Party Apps

The last piece of the puzzle in all of Apple’s platforms is third-party apps. Now more than ever, their importance in shaping the platforms is beyond doubt, so I’d like to feature updates to a few indie apps that are using some of the new watchOS APIs.

Oxpecker

Oxpecker is a Mastodon client built exclusively for the Apple Watch. You can do quite a lot with it, from scrolling your timeline to replying to posts to viewing your notifications.

Its latest update supports Double Tap, but developer Vincent Neo has gone further by making it very customizable. Within the app’s settings, you can choose what Double Tap does when the app is open. You can choose from scrolling (the default), creating a post, viewing the nearest visible post, and refreshing your timeline.

As good as this new functionality is, it does cry out for Apple to add more variations to the tapping gesture so you both can scroll and create a new post without touching your screen.

Zenitizer

From Manuel Kehl, Zenitizer is a clutter-free meditation app for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and even Vision Pro. With its latest release, the app now supports interactive widgets, Live Activities, and Double Tap. There are two widget options: one showing your daily goal and a group widget to launch up to three different meditations.

When you tap any of the meditations in the group widget, the app will launch and start the selected meditation. It then will launch a Live Activity in the Smart Stack that includes the current stage of the meditation and a stop button.

As if that wasn’t enough, Double Tap now works within the app to quickly start or stop a meditation. It’s great upgrade all around.

Actionary

A simple app for glanceable health stats like heart rate, steps, and cardio fitness, Actionary has embraced the new group widget displaying the three most recent metrics.

µBrowser

As far as I know, this is the only browser available for the Apple Watch. You can enter a URL and scroll through almost any website, all on your wrist.

The latest update, developer Arno Appenzeller adds a new group widget containing either three bookmarked sites or your three most recently visited sites. And because watchOS supports scrolling in any app with Double Tap, you can scroll down a webpage hands-free. I’m not suggesting this means you can secretly scroll through websites in boring work meetings, but I’m not not suggesting it.

Wrist Pipe

This app is built to be a stand-in for a pitch pipe. It’s a utility that helps you tune your instruments and includes the ability to store many different set lists.

In the latest update, developer David Freeman has added the ability to play the selected pitch with Double Tap. I imagine this would be perfect for times when your opposite hand is busy holding an instrument.

Chronicling

Chronicling, by Rebecca Owen, allows you to track anything in your life. The latest update for watchOS 11 adds an interactive widget to log an event directly from the Smart Stack. It also includes Double Tap support to log the event that’s currently on-screen in the app.

Conclusion

This is my first watchOS review, and to be honest, I wasn’t fully sure what to expect going in. Alex has done such a great job with previous releases that I just wanted to provide a good enough experience for readers that they wouldn’t come banging down the doors at MacStories HQ (a fictional place that should definitely exist), asking him to return to reviewing watchOS.

One aspect of the review I didn’t expect was the sheer scale of what there was to cover. I think there were two reasons for this. On the one hand, there is far more to these operating systems that we use every day than we realize; we only use the parts that we need. On the other hand, this has been a bumper year not just for watchOS but for the Apple Watch as a whole. (Just don’t tell the Apple Watch Ultra.)

The Series 10’s form factor underwent notable changes, and charging speeds and screen viewing angles were upgraded. On the software side, there was something new in almost every corner of the OS.

Training Load and Fitness app upgrades improve how we exercise. Vitals can help us sleep better (and that’s to say nothing of the just-released sleep apnea detection capabilities). The Smart Stack is fully smart now and creates an Apple Watch that is even more adaptable to our current situations. Then there’s Translate and Check In that make their way over from our iPhones and land successfully on the Apple Watch. Even Double Tap is more useful.

It’s a really expansive update. There is one outlier, however.

In his review of watchOS 10 last year, Alex praised the new Smart Stack but lamented the reassignment of Control Center to the side button without any UI changes. He suggested that Apple may not have had enough time to update it and watchOS 11 could see some refinement. Well, spoiler alert: they haven’t touched it.

This is the one significant part of watchOS that Apple has completely ignored, and it’s starting to show its age. In the same year the company introduced interactive widgets in the Smart Stack, the Control Center does exactly the same thing it has done for – checks notes – seven years. This really has to change in watchOS 12, and seeing how much work has been poured into watchOS 11, I’m hopeful that Apple has the bandwidth to take a real run at it.

Now back to the good part. Reading the fantastic conclusion to Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 18 review, I was struck by what he described as his interest in people. The Apple Watch has always been a very personal device – it tracks your heart rate, for goodness sake – but so many of the changes in watchOS 11 are designed to make fundamental differences for the people who wear an Apple Watch.

Of course, the fitness elements are very much aimed at people, but take a look at all the other new additions. Pregnancy tracking aims not only to keep track of a pregnancy, but also to help with things like heart rate monitoring and mental health. Check In is meant to help you feel safe when you’re out and about. Translation is now here to help you communicate better with people who don’t speak your native tongue. Finally, the Smart Stack adjusts to what’s happening in your day.

All of these features are focused on people and their interactions with each other and the world around them.

It’s also notable that while so much coming from Apple right now seems focused on that other thing, watchOS 11 is almost entirely plowing its own furrow. It arrives complete and ready to go. As someone who’s been using the iOS and iPadOS 18 betas over the summer, it’s been great not to have to wait for the other shoe to drop for watchOS.

There is a lot to enjoy about this year’s release, and the past three months I’ve been using it have been fun. Almost all of the features relevant to me (again, I can’t enjoy the miracle of pregnancy) have stuck after I tried using them. I feel that the Apple Watch is more relevant than ever, and judging from this release, so does Apple – which makes me happy.

Credits

This is my first year reviewing watchOS, and it is by far the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken. It could not have been done without chocolate, the music of Eels, and the following people (cats are people):

L&L, my girls. Thank you for the amazing love and support you always give me, as well as making me laugh more than anyone possibly could.

Nina and Ella, for keeping me company while I wrote and bringing me that dead mouse once.

My family, and in particular my parents, for the lifelong support of my nerdy tendencies. Thanks for introducing me to a Macintosh 30 years ago, Dad.

Federico and John, for your patience, support, and for having faith in me to do this. You constantly inspire.

Devon, for being an incredible editor and offering suggestions that are genuinely helping me do good words and write more pretty.

Niléane, we’ve been on the team for a year now, and it’s been so much fun doing it with you.

Paul Stockton, for walking around for ages trying to test out a feature for me.

Jonathan (no, the other one), for getting me that Vitals screenshot.

All the app developers for doing awesome work and in particular those who sent me betas to test.

Ulysses, Remind Me Faster, Shortcuts, Apple Notes, Reeder Classic, Omnivore, Photoshop, and Blender. Awesome apps that got this done.

Everyone at Apple who keeps plugging away at these great features for the Apple Watch. Can’t wait to see what’s next (sleep debt tracking and recovery scores?!)

Every Club MacStories member for supporting everything we do here.

Our amazing Discord members. As Community Manager, you make it easy; I’ve not come close to kicking any of you. You’re so nice, smart, and considerate of one another. The Internet could learn a lot from you.

And of course, you, dear reader. You made it this far and even read the credits. Kudos. You get a gold star and my eternal gratitude.