watchOS 5: The MacStories Review

watchOS had a bumpy first few years. Some poor decisions and perhaps a premature initial launch forced significant design changes to be in order right away. It wasn’t until last year’s watchOS 4 release that it finally felt like the waters had calmed. Apple seemed to have solidified the brunt of its focus around fitness and audio, while also debuting a healthy backdrop of first-party apps, new watch faces, and machine learning features. The Siri watch face was the big addition for both of those last two categories, and while its initial introduction was underwhelming, the ideas behind it were intriguing. The redesigned Workout and Music apps along with background audio during workouts were excellent additions to the Apple Watch’s core foundation. All things considered, Apple pushed a great update last year, and it only got better as the year progressed.

While it didn’t ship in time for watchOS 4’s launch in September, streaming from Apple Music was released late the next month in watchOS 4.1. The ability to stream music in the background during workouts freed runners and other athletes from being tied to their phones while they exercised. Paired with the redesigned Workout app – which put live statistics front and center while keeping Now Playing and workout controls just a swipe away – watchOS 4 established a truly better fitness experience for Apple’s smartwatch.

The audio story that Apple told last year felt much less complete. Despite receiving a significant amount of attention in Apple’s marketing efforts, the Apple Watch’s music improvements seemed almost strictly geared toward workouts. Background audio was limited to workout apps and withheld from the platform as a whole, the first-party Now Playing screen continued to monopolize possession of volume controls, and the Music app only gave manual access to preselected songs instead of the full music library on your iPhone1. Audio on the Apple Watch had received some strong improvements, but the scope of those positive consequences felt unnecessarily limited.

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Thankfully, Apple seems to agree. This year’s watchOS 5 update, released today for all Apple Watches Series 1 and later, fills in the gaps of the watchOS audio feature set. Third-party audio apps can now run in the background, and full audio controls including volume adjustment via the Digital Crown have been made available to them. watchOS 5 also introduces the first-party Podcasts app, which supports automatic syncing of new episodes that you’re subscribed to and streaming of any show in the iTunes podcast directory.

Beyond audio, watchOS 5 also builds on the solid fitness foundation with activity competitions, expanded Workout types, automatic workout detection, and advanced running statistics. Siri has continued to receive attention as well, introducing third-party integrations to the Siri watch face and a raise-to-speak feature which truncates the inveterate “Hey Siri” prefix for the first time on any platform. A new Walkie-Talkie app marks the first return to novelty Apple Watch communication methods since Digital Touch, but this time I think Apple might have tapped into a legitimate, albeit niche use case. Top things off with improved notifications, the introduction of web content, and NFC-powered student ID cards and we have a substantial watchOS update on our hands.

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Fitness

Fitness is clearly the Apple Watch’s breakthrough use case, and Apple is not dropping the ball on it for watchOS 5. Automatic workout detection takes aim at one of the biggest frustrations of the Watch’s fitness system, new workout types expand fine-grained calorie counting to more audiences, and activity competitions further gamify daily activity streaks. Fitness in watchOS 5 sheds frustrations and boosts accuracy and addiction, an excellent formula for promoting healthier lifestyles for all Apple Watch users.

Activity Competitions

The new competitions feature in watchOS 5 pits you against your friends in seven-day competitions based on the Apple Watch’s three activity metrics: move, exercise, and stand. Competitions can be started via the notifications that you receive when your friends complete workouts, or from the Sharing section of the Apple Watch or iOS Activity apps. Each competition is between you and just one friend, but you can be involved in multiple overlapping competitions if you want to face off against more than one friend at a time. Once a competition request is accepted it will begin the following day.

Over the seven days of an activity competition, you and your friend’s activity will be tracked each day to generate points. The points are calculated based on the percentage of each activity metric that you fulfill, and you can both earn a maximum of 600 points each day. At the end of the week the participant with the most points wins the competition.

Point calculations are based on a simple formula. Stand, exercise, and move metrics are each worth 100 points if you achieve 100% of your goal for them on a given competition day. If you generate greater than 100% on any of these metrics then you’ll get more points based on that percentage. For example, 200% of your move and exercise goals will get you 200 points for each of those categories. If you stand for all 24 hours of a given day then you can get 200% of your stand goal too, but you’ll have a much easier time hitting 600 points by just pushing move or exercise higher than 200%.

The only enforced cap is 600 total points, so if you theoretically achieved 600% of your move goal while getting 0% of your stand and exercise goals then you would still receive 600 points for the day. On the other hand, if you achieved 600% on move and exercise in the same day, you’d still only end up with 600 points. This cap establishes an emphasis on consistency throughout the entire competition. You can’t build a huge lead with a couple explosive performances and then coast to the finish line on rest days.

The great equalizer of activity competitions is the move goal. Exercise and stand goals for all Apple Watch users are set at 30 minutes and 12 hours, respectively. Move goals on the other hand are set by each user individually. Since competitions generate points based on the percentage achieved for each goal, having your move goal set to a higher calorie count than your opponent creates a handicap.

The obvious advantage of this handicap is that Apple Watch users who are less active than their friends can still enjoy competitions with them. The potential disadvantage is that people can easily win competitions just by setting their move goals to significantly lower calorie counts than their opponents. I think Apple made the right choice here; if you’re competing with a friend who’s setting a low calorie count just to win, the solution is to stop competing with that person.

If you want to compete with a group of friends instead of just one other person, you’ll need to coordinate to all challenge each other individually and make sure everyone accepts by the end of the same day. If you can make that happen then all of the competitions will begin the following day and proceed for the same period of time. This isn’t ideal since the competitions will all show up as separate entities, but it will at least achieve the outcome you’re looking for. Competitions with multiple participants will be an easy win for this feature down the road, and I hope to see Apple implement that by watchOS 6.

You can check your status during an active competition at any time from the Activity app’s Sharing section on Apple Watch or iOS. Competitions are shown at the top with each participant’s total points and the number of days remaining. You can tap these to expand a more detailed view including your opponent’s activity rings for the current day, the total points for the week and the current points from the day, and a small graph showing the point match-ups from every day of the competition. The graph is fairly featureless, showing only bars on Apple Watch and only bars plus daily points on iOS. I consistently find myself wanting to tap on a particular day to see the breakdown of move/exercise/stand stats for each participant, but unfortunately the graph cannot be interacted with in any way on either watchOS or iOS.

Beneath the graph you’ll find a “Total Wins” section which shows the overall results from all competitions you’ve had with this particular friend. You’ll also find your friend’s activity statistics from the current day, and a button to send your friend a message. On iOS the send message button is replaced by options to mute notifications for the competition, hide your activity from your friend, or remove your friend entirely. It’s unclear why the “Hide my Activity” button exists in the competition view, because tapping it induces an alert which says you can’t hide activity from a friend while you are competing.

If you’re interested in seeing the full details from an earlier day in the competition, you need to go back to the top level of the Sharing tab and scroll down to find the day in question, then tap on the friend that you’re competing with to see their daily breakdown. To see your own daily breakdown you need to back out of there and tap on your own name from the same day. In the future I’d really like to see the graph in the competition view made tappable to expand this head-to-head data in a simpler and more intuitive way.

When an activity competition draws to a close, each member is presented with an Activity notification describing either their victory or their defeat, plus a button to kick off a rematch with your opponent. When you complete your first activity competition you’ll receive a Competition Complete award in the Activity app, and if you defeated your opponent you’ll also receive a victory award for that specific friend. Both of these awards are displayed with numbers below them indicating how many competitions you’ve completed and how many times you’ve defeated that friend.

As someone who has never drawn much motivation from just filling up my Activity rings every day, I was surprised by how much more motivated I was during my activity competition. I expected to be trounced by Federico’s daily workout regime, but my lower calorie burn goals allowed me to stay in it.

I did notice a couple days into the week that my calorie goal was excessively low since I hadn’t paid much attention to it in years. Setting that metric to something a little more reasonable (although still lower than Ticci’s) put an end to my easy wins from the first two days, but it also made the competition much more enjoyable and pushed me to exercise and move more than I had for a while.

Competitions feel like a natural addition to the Apple Watch’s techniques for getting users to move more. Gamification of activity and exercise goals is always a winning strategy, and Apple’s implementation of this feature is well-considered and effective. There are definitely areas for improvement, but they’re all iterative – like making metrics more easily accessible from the graph screen and adding competitions with more than one opponent. For the time being, Apple has shipped a great feature which I encourage everyone to experiment with at least once. Competitions just might be the fuel you need to start living a more active life.

New Workout Types

A relatively small variety of workout types in the watchOS Workout app are optimized for higher accuracy calorie burn tracking. In watchOS 4 these workout types were Walking, Running, Cycling, Elliptical, Rower, Stair Stepper, High Intensity Interval Training, Swimming, and Wheelchair. For each of these specialized types of workouts, Apple has done extended research and testing to improve metric tracking. Any other types of workouts fall into the “Other” category, and for those your Apple Watch will calculate metrics equivalent to a brisk walk whenever its sensor readings are not available.

As of watchOS 5, Apple is adding two more types of workouts to that specialized selection: Yoga and Hiking. If you participate in either of these activities, make sure to pick the corresponding new type in the Workout app when you begin. For yoga sessions the improvements are mostly around calorie burn tracking, but the Hiking workout goes even further. Real-time elevation statistics will now be tracked for Hiking workouts, letting you know how many feet you’ve climbed.

Pace Alerts and Cadence

During outdoor running workouts you now have the option to set pace alerts for your average or rolling miles. Just choose a time goal for your miles and decide on a type of alert, then you’ll be tapped on the wrist with a pop-up after completing each mile. Average mile alerts will track your average mile time and tap you at the end of each mile. If you look at the pop-up you’ll see your current mile average as well as some large text informing you whether you’re ahead of or behind your target pace.

Rolling mile pace alerts will track only your single previous mile time. After each mile you’ll get an alert telling you what your pace was for that mile, and a text block displaying whether you were ahead of or behind your target pace. Your rolling mile pace will also be displayed as one of the statistics on the Workout app’s main view during your workout, so you can always check and see what the pace of your preceding mile was.

Pace alerts can be configured in the Workout app by tapping the “…” button in the top right corner of the Outdoor Run workout type (at the moment Outdoor Run is the only type that supports this feature). At the bottom of that screen you’ll see a “Set Pace Alert” button. Tap it to open the settings view for your alert, then tap the mile button at the top to set your target minutes and seconds for each mile (if you don’t set the target mile pace first you’ll find the remaining options to be grayed out). Next pick whether you want to be alerted with your average or rolling mile pace, then hit the back button in the top left corner to exit out. You’ll still need to hit that back button one more time to get back to the main workout view – I’m not sure why there isn’t a confirm button in the pace alert settings view to shortcut you back to the top level.

You can’t configure more than one type of pace alert at a time, so you’ll have to pick between average and rolling. If you want to switch then just go back to the pace alert settings as described above and change the type.

Once your pace alert is configured you’ll see the setting reflected on your Outdoor Run workout button in the workout selection view. Next time you start that workout you’ll get pace alerts after each mile.

Alongside the new rolling workout metric, watchOS 5 also enables tracking cadence during running workouts. This metric is shown below rolling miles on the main workout view while you run. Cadence is a measurement of strides per minute, so you’ll see it in the Workout app as “SPM”.

Cadence and pace alerts are a great addition to the Apple Watch’s workout tracking capabilities. In the future I hope to see Apple expand these options to other types of workouts besides Outdoor Run, but it makes sense for them to have started small for now. Tracking miles should be one of the easiest and most accurate metrics for the Apple Watch, so it’s not a big problem for it to automatically track pace by mile. For other workout types, such as swimming laps, this metric would be a lot harder to pin down accurately.

With that said, I’m not sure why the Outdoor Cycling workout didn’t receive the pace alert feature. This seems like another natural fit, and since miles are already being tracked for that workout type it should have been trivial to add alerts. On a similar note, I’d love to see cadence tracking added to Swimming workout types based on stroke frequency.

Automatic Workout Detection

A consistent annoyance since the original Apple Watch has been starting a workout physically but forgetting to start a software workout on the Watch. In the past there was no way to get that lost data back, your workout just wouldn’t be tracked. With watchOS 5 Apple is taking a shot at solving this problem.

Automatic workout detection works like you’d expect it to: as your Apple Watch periodically monitors your heart rate and consistently monitors your movement, it can determine when your activity appears to be elevated. It’s unsurprisingly a bit of a black box as to exactly how this determination is made, but the result is that your Apple Watch will now tap you on the wrist with a prompt when it thinks you may have started a workout. The prompt gives you the option to start a software workout in the Workout app, and if you accept that option it will tack on the time since it first detected that you might be working out.

On the other end of your workouts, automatic workout detection will also try to determine when your workouts have ended. In past iterations of the system, if you didn’t manually end a workout then it would just continue to track forever. If you receive the prompt that your workout has been detected as possibly complete and you manually confirm that assumption, your Watch will now remove the excess workout time since it first detected the drop off in your activity.

A Little Too Eager

In typical Apple fashion this feature allows no manual tuning, which in my case means that every day as I take my ten minute walk to work I’m unable to stop my Apple Watch from asking if I’d like to start an Outdoor Walk workout. When the prompt comes during those walks it is generally around the seventh or eighth minute, but it shows up seemingly randomly. I’ll often not receive it for days at a time – during which I’ll think maybe some sort of machine learning has determined that I don’t consider my brief walks to be workouts – but eventually the prompt comes again. If the Apple Watch wants to silently count that walking time toward my workout ring in the Activity app then that’s fine, but I have no interest in manually starting and stopping a workout every day as I walk down the street to work.

You can of course disable the automatic workout detection alerts entirely, but I just want to turn them off for these specific situations. For other times, such as when I’m working out or running, I definitely want to keep the alerts on. Overall it’s not the biggest deal to be sometimes reminded unnecessarily, but the repetition of the alert paired with my never actually accepting it makes me feel like it shouldn’t be too hard for the Watch to decide to stop sending them.

If you do want to turn these alerts completely off, you can do so from the Watch app for iOS in the Workout app settings. Automatic workout detection is broken out into two options there, so you can individually enable or disable “Start Workout Reminder” or “End Workout Reminder.”

Automatic Workout Detection in Practice

One of my main sources of activity comes from playing ultimate frisbee each week. I try to start workouts on my Apple Watch during these weekly pick-up games, but often I forget. This is a perfect case for automatic workout detection, and it’s worked quite well for me in my testing.

There’s a lot going on in ultimate frisbee games, and I’m usually engaged enough in it that I don’t notice the tap on my wrist and thus miss the notification to start a workout. Thankfully, Apple thought of this possibility and accounted for it. If you miss one of the Apple Watch’s automated prompts to accept that you’ve started a workout, you can still access it via the Workout app on your Apple Watch as long as your workout is still ongoing.

This summer when I’ve noticed mid-game that I haven’t started a workout, and also failed to notice the automated alert, I’ve been able to open up the Workout app and be presented with a new temporary card at the top. The card looks like the other workout type cards, but this one shows how much time has been automatically tracked on your current workout, as well as what type of workout the Watch thinks it is. Tapping this card tells the Apple Watch that a workout is indeed occurring, and tracking continues as usual from there.

Automatic workout detection is clearly a much-needed feature, and in practice I’ve been pleased with it overall. The feature is undoubtedly useful and will save a lot of headaches for users competing in new activity competitions or trying to keep their exercise ring streaks going. As more data points start flowing now that it is released to the public, I expect to see fewer false positive alerts over time. I still think that it could be useful for people to have a small amount of manual intervention in this regard, such as an added option in the notification to never ask you about this particular workout type at this time again. In the age of machine learning though, I expect Apple will just try to clean this up automatically instead of giving users manual controls.

Audio

On the audio side of things, watchOS 5 brings two key improvements: a new Podcasts app and the ability for third-party developers to run their audio apps in the background. On top of that, third-party apps can now include the default volume controls, which you may be used to seeing on Apple’s Now Playing screen. This means when you have a third-party app controlling your audio, you’ll still be able to raise your wrist and spin the Digital Crown to immediately control volume.

Ending the Volume Conundrum

In watchOS 4 Apple introduced a new feature called “Auto-Launch Audio Apps.” Available in the Watch app for iPhone and enabled by default, this setting allowed third-party apps on Apple Watch to automatically launch on wrist-raise if their iPhone counterpart was controlling audio playback. That sounds great in theory, but in practice it was often a pain due to those apps being unable to show the system volume controls.

For customers who use AirPods in particular, the Apple Watch is one of the quickest and easiest methods of controlling audio volume. The conundrum in question arose because if users just uninstalled the Apple Watch versions of their audio apps then raising their wrist would show Apple’s Now Playing screen instead. This first-party interface had instant access to playback and volume controls. When forced to choose between volume control and using a relevant third-party Apple Watch app, volume control won out for many users.

watchOS 5 finally democratizes volume control throughout the operating system. Third-party audio apps can display the system volume controls within their interfaces, and those interfaces can then be auto-launched without any disadvantages to the Now Playing screen. Assuming developers get their apps updated to make use of this, the incentive to uninstall these apps should be eliminated.

If you uninstalled any Apple Watch audio apps last year to resolve the volume problem, don’t forget to try reinstalling them once they update to work with watchOS 5. Volume controls paired with background audio means these apps could be significantly more useful than they were able to be in the past.

Background Audio

In previous years the only third-party apps allowed to continue running in the background on Apple Watch were workout apps. This led to some interesting strategies for podcast apps, such as starting fake workouts to get background privileges and then just playing audio. The downside of that method (other than risking rejection by App Review) is that during workouts your Apple Watch checks your heart rate more consistently and may fire up the GPS – both of which burn battery very quickly. With watchOS 5, developers of third-party audio apps will be able to execute in the background without eating through a workout-level amount of power.

Background audio mode on Apple Watch mostly only applies to when your Watch is out of range of its connected iPhone. When the iPhone and the Watch are in range, it’s generally easier to have the iPhone play the audio and just control playback via your Watch. This is particularly true when you take battery into account: iPhones can play audio for hours and still last all day, but when the Apple Watch is the audio source it will consume power much more quickly than usual (although still at a slower pace than active workouts). Once the Watch loses connection to its companion though, background audio mode means you’re no longer explicitly cut off from listening to audio from that application. Prior to watchOS 5 you were, with the exceptions of Apple’s first-party Music app or any workout apps actively running workouts.

An important omission from the new background audio capabilities is streaming. When disconnected from an iPhone, third-party apps will only be able to play audio that was downloaded onto the device beforehand. This applies to cellular Apple Watches as well – streaming is limited to Apple Music via the Music app and podcasts via Apple’s new Podcasts app for watchOS.

Podcasts

watchOS 5 marks the debut of Apple’s first-party Podcasts app on the Apple Watch. Like the rest of Apple’s Watch apps, Podcasts is simple and straightforward. In fact, Podcasts has the exact same design as the first-party Music app. I’m okay with this lack of distinction for a watchOS app. These apps should be as quick and easy to navigate as possible, and sharing a common design between apps will make it trivial for users to switch between them.

Like Music, the Podcasts app opens to a vertically-scrollable column of cards with one or two buttons at the very top (two if you’re actively playing an episode, otherwise one). The cards in Podcasts display the show artwork for each podcast that has at least one episode downloaded to the Watch. If you’ve started any of these episodes then the corresponding card will have a progress bar at the bottom marking your playback position. As you scroll to each card, you’ll see an episode name shown at the very bottom of the display. Tapping on the card will immediately begin playback of the specified episode.

The episodes triggered by the cards will always be the latest episode of the show unless you’ve already listened to a certain percentage of an older episode. I’m not sure what the exact percentage is, but after listening to a little over a minute of an hour and a half long Upgrade episode I saw the card switch to that older episode instead of the most recent one. Once you’ve completed an episode it will be automatically deleted from your Watch, and if it was the last episode of a particular show then that show’s card will be greyed out on the main Podcasts screen.

If you want to specify an episode of a show other than the latest, you’ll need to scroll to the top of the card list and tap on the Library button. This will open a list view of only the podcast names rather than full-screen cards with artwork. Find your podcast in the list and tap it to see all episodes that are downloaded to your Watch. Picking an episode from that list will begin playback and propel you to the now playing screen of the Podcasts app.

Podcasts’ now playing screen features a play/pause button, 15 second skip back and 30 second skip forward buttons, and volume controls. On the bottom right is a number showing the current playback speed. This defaults to 1x, but just tap the number to cycle it by half steps. In total you can pick between half speed, full speed, one and a half speed, and double speed. On the bottom left you’ll see a list icon, and tapping that will open a list of all episodes of the current podcast which have been downloaded to the Watch. This is a shortcut to jump between any of those episodes right from the now playing screen. Finally, force pressing on the now playing screen will show the AirPlay button, which can be tapped to select the audio output source for your podcast to play from. Unfortunately the Apple Watch itself is still not available as a playback source, so you can’t listen to podcasts via your Watch’s built-in speaker.

According to Apple, Podcasts is also able to stream any podcast episode available in the iTunes podcasts directory. There’s no interface to search for these (even the podcasts in your library only show downloaded episodes, there’s no way to access a full list of all episodes available), so your only option is to ask Siri to play the podcast you’re looking for. Siri will then look it up and should in theory start playing the latest episode.

I don’t have a cellular Apple Watch to test podcast streaming with, but I did try connecting my non-cellular model to Wi-Fi and asking Siri to play several podcasts that I had no episodes downloaded for. Siri understood my queries and seemed to do a good job figuring out which show I was asking for. Unfortunately, after informing me that my Watch was attempting to play the show in question, it would then fail after a few seconds and state that it couldn’t play that podcast at this time.

This could just be a bug in the beta, but as of the GM seed it’s still not functioning. It’s also possible that it works on cellular Apple Watches and just not over Wi-Fi, but Siri certainly understands my requests and thinks that it can do what I’m asking, right up until it fails. Hopefully Apple gets this issue fixed in an update soon. In the meantime, your mileage may vary when attempting to stream podcast episodes on your Apple Watch.

Other than the streaming issue, I’m quite impressed by Apple’s new Podcasts app. It’s about as full featured as I could ask for, and since syncing new episodes happens automatically in the background I never actually found myself wanting to stream anything. All of my podcasts were always already waiting for me, and the card view made it easy to kick one off without digging through menus on the tiny screen. The Podcasts now playing screen is a little cramped, but it offers all the controls I’m looking for so I’m okay with that trade-off. On the new, larger Series 4 displays I’m sure it won’t be cramped at all.

Siri

Siri is one of the Apple Watch’s core interaction methods, and Apple isn’t resting on its laurels when it comes to pushing the virtual assistant forward on the device. This year we see Apple continue to expand on its machine learning-powered Siri watch face, opening it up to third-party apps and Shortcuts. We also see the first change to Siri’s core trigger phrase on any platform since its introduction: the “Hey Siri” prefix is no longer required at all.

Siri Watch Face Updates

The Siri watch face was introduced last year, and promised to surface intelligent suggestions on your Watch based on what you wanted to see or do at any given moment. It’s a great idea, but I didn’t think it delivered. In my watchOS 4 review I concluded the following:

I’m sold on the promise of the Siri watch face, but that promise is just not being fulfilled right now. I am optimistic though, and in future watchOS versions I think this watch face is one of the places to keep an eye on. If Apple can ever figure out how to make the data behind this feature actually intelligent then this could be a really great utility on the Apple Watch. I’d love to see support for third-party data sources added as well, but if Apple can’t even get the intelligence down for its own apps then I’m skeptical of how well it will do pulling data from third-parties. I hope that they can eventually pull this off.

A year later Apple is pushing the face forward by adding a new gray color scheme (you can pick this option in the face’s Customize view on your Watch or in the Watch app for iOS) and introducing the third-party integrations it was sorely lacking before. Unfortunately, in my testing this summer those third-party apps weren’t being surfaced, and the overall intelligence was not noticeably improved.

Apple claims that the watch face is smarter than ever before, but that hasn’t borne out for me. Over the past few months I ran iOS 12, watchOS 5, and used the Siri face the whole time. Even if the Watch was starting from scratch with its machine learning about me, three months should be more than enough time to gather data and start showing me relevant cards. Instead, I’ve been consistently presented with randomly selected stock price changes, old photos of ex-girlfriends, weather conditions from cities I’m not in, and a “Take a minute to Breathe” card that never seems to not be there.

I haven’t opened the Stocks app in years, I don’t know why I’d need to know the current weather in Cupertino while I’m in Minneapolis, and I haven’t used the Breathe app since my watchOS 4 review a year ago. As for the photos, Apple needs to learn the lesson that Google, Facebook, and other “this day a year ago” services learned the hard way: photos from a year or years ago are not always happy memories.

Apple’s version of the old photos problem feels particularly egregious because it displays directly on the face of your watch, and because getting rid of photos you don’t want to see isn’t easy to do. There’s no way to tap on a card and tell the Siri watch face to dismiss it. That card will stay active as long as Siri thinks it’s relevant (which, in the case of photos, seems to be the entire day every time one shows up). The only way to manually remove something is to open the Watch app on iOS, navigate to your Siri watch face in the My Faces section, and entirely disable the app that is showing the card you don’t want. Most people won’t know this, so they’ll either just deal with it for the day or switch faces to something more pleasant. I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t let you tap the card and choose to remove it. At least for me that option would go a long way toward making this not really an issue at all, and it seems like something that should be supported anyway to empower users to help tune the machine learning.

I did eventually turn off Photos, Stocks, and Breathe in the settings for my Siri face in the iOS Watch app. It’s not at all difficult to do that, but any time a setting needs to be changed it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of users are never going to touch it. I was hoping that the machine learning which Apple has lauded for this update would have made manually adjusting settings unnecessary, but for at least another year it looks like that won’t be the case.

Regarding third-party apps showing up on the Siri watch face, I’m unable to say for sure whether that feature is working at all. I’ve been running CARROT Weather, Overcast, UpHabit, ETA, and Shortcuts betas on my Watch for various amounts of time (all for more than three weeks, and Shortcuts in particular for about three months). Each of these apps claims to surface shortcuts or cards to the Siri watch face, but not once have I seen any of them show up for me.

There’s a hidden Developer menu that appears in Settings on your iPhone if you plug the device into a Mac that is running Xcode. Among other options, that menu includes a “Force Sync Shortcuts to Watch” button and a “Display Recent Shortcuts” toggle. The former is pretty self explanatory, but the latter will force the Siri watch face to show shortcuts or cards that apps have most recently served up for it to optionally display. This toggle exists so that developers can test their card recommendations on the Siri face without needing the machine learning to pick them by itself2.

I’m not recommending that you enable this toggle from the hidden menu. Quite the opposite in fact, you should definitely not enable it. Apps are allowed to send lots of different shortcuts and cards to Siri all at once, so when this toggle is enabled you will probably end up with something like six consecutive CARROT Weather cards showing the current or tomorrow’s forecast. This is perfectly fine for apps to be doing because the Siri face should be intelligently triaging these options and only exposing a relevant set.

I mention the menu because it’s the only way to determine for sure that apps are indeed successfully providing their suggestions to the Siri watch face. Once I was able to verify this on my Watch I turned the toggle back off and spent another few days waiting to see if Siri ever picked any third-party cards to display. It did not. Even though I check the weather with CARROT every single day, listen to podcasts in Overcast constantly, and run various Shortcuts I’ve put together pretty consistently, Siri never displayed any of these as cards on my watch face.

Take all of this with the usual “I’m running a beta” grain of salt, but as of the GM release I’ve still yet to see a third-party app show up unless I flip that Settings toggle to force it. The Force Sync Shortcuts to Watch button did not make any change here either. Maybe with the public release Apple will be flipping a switch to open the floodgates to third-party cards on the Siri face, but as of this review’s writing I can’t say that it’s worked at all for me. I hope it’s just something Apple needs to turn on, because if Siri’s “intelligent” suggestions are picking Stocks and Photos over the third-party apps that I use on a daily basis, then something is seriously wrong.

No More “Hey Siri”

With the lack of space for typing and swiping on the Apple Watch’s tiny screen, Siri has always been the best choice of input methods on the device. Triggering Siri by prefixing a command with “Hey Siri” while the screen is on has been around since the very beginning. With watchOS 5, Apple is looking to streamline access to its virtual assistant even further.

If you’re using an Apple Watch Series 3 or higher (no luck for Series 1 or Series 2 owners here) then after this update you’ll be able to talk to Siri hands-free without actually having to say “Hey Siri.” Just raise your wrist and start talking, and your Watch will detect it and start translating your incoming command. At least, in theory that’s how it will go.

When I first heard this feature announced I was quite excited for it. Removing the monotonous “Hey Siri” prefix sounded great, but my excitement quickly gave way to trepidation. Executing this feature perfectly would clearly be difficult. If the threshold was set too low then Siri would start showing up whenever I check the time on my wrist whilst talking to someone. If the threshold was too high then Siri would frustratingly fail to trigger when I give it a command. Repeating an entire command because Siri didn’t auto-detect it is even more inconvenient and time consuming than just saying “Hey Siri.”

To their credit, I think Apple got very close on this feature. Unfortunately, very close isn’t quite good enough in this particular regard. They did stray toward conservatism on their estimates, and I think that was the right decision. Throughout this summer of testing I never once noticed Siri on my Apple Watch activating when I wasn’t trying to talk to it. I think that would have been far more annoying and could potentially make people more nervous about the Watch if it were falsely triggering consistently and transcribing whatever they happened to be saying or what someone else was saying around them.

In my experience though, activating Siri without its trusty wake phrase was far too finicky and unreliable. It may have worked about 75% of the time, but 25% is way too high of a failure rate for a feature to be particularly useful. Whenever it worked I absolutely loved it, but each time it failed left me more annoyed than the last. This was particularly so because in a failure scenario you either need to lower your wrist and then raise it again to get another potential shot at it realizing you’re talking to it, or you need to repeat your query with a “Hey Siri” prefix. If you do the former then you’re wasting even more time, but if you have to do the latter then there’s no point in this feature anyway.

I’m hoping the Series 4 Watch will significantly improve detection for this feature over the Series 3. If you’re a Series 3 owner then I’d at least give it a try for a while, maybe your Watch will do better than mine did. It seems to me that the Watch is using a combination of wrist movement and volume detection from the microphone. I got the best results when bringing my Watch all the way up to my mouth and speaking directly into the mic.

My failure rate on talking to Siri when I prefix with “Hey Siri” is almost zero, so ultimately I’ve gone back to just doing that. I’m sure Apple will be improving this detection over time, and I’m excited for when they’re able to do so with high accuracy. Speaking straight into your Watch without a prefix clearly feels like the future. It takes a lot of the awkwardness out of Siri requests and it’s quicker and easier when it works. I hope Series 4 will be better in this regard, but even if it isn’t I’m excited for Apple to refine it over time.

If you decide you’d rather disable this feature altogether so that your Watch isn’t even attempting it, you can do so in the Settings app on your Apple Watch in General ⇾ Siri.

Walkie-Talkie

Brand new in watchOS 5, Walkie-Talkie joins the short list of apps available on Apple Watch which do not have a companion app on iOS. It also joins the short list of Apple Watch-specific communication interfaces; a list which thus far has been a panoply of flops from the Friends interface to the giant 3D emoji GIFs to Digital Touch. The latter did eventually make it to iOS and does still persist in the Messages app, but I don’t think anyone ever actually uses it.

Due to this category’s troubled history, I initially struggled to rally optimism for another new Apple Watch communication method. As I’ve thought the feature over though, it’s become clear that Walkie-Talkie brings a lot more to the table than usual.

The new app is actually embedded deep into the system, and it does pretty much exactly what its name suggests. If you enable Walkie-Talkie mode – a simple on/off slider at the top of the Walkie-Talkie app – you’ll start seeing the app’s small yellow icon flash briefly at the top center of your watch face every time you raise your wrist. At first I thought this was a bit heavy-handed for something I don’t expect to use all the time, but once I realized what exactly that tiny yellow icon implied I was instantly on board.

When Walkie-Talkie mode is enabled, at any point in time any of the friends who you have added in the Walkie-Talkie app can start speaking to you through your Apple Watch’s speaker. You don’t have to accept the transmission, you don’t get notified first by a tap on the wrist, your Watch just beeps once to indicate a Walkie-Talkie message and then starts streaming your friend’s voice out into the air. Think about that. This is a major break from any previous system-level communication method on watchOS, iOS, or even macOS.

That little yellow icon is indicating that your system is in a state where it can start making noise unexpectedly at any moment. Moreover, that noise will be a voice and the Watch will be broadcasting that voice at whatever volume setting you left Walkie-Talkie mode in last. By default, it’s quite loud.

The potential consequences of this are obvious, but the potential benefits should be as well. Actual walkie-talkies are an old technology which has remained in use for decades because it is extremely valuable in specific circumstances. The watchOS 5 Walkie-Talkie app brings essentially the exact same benefits, but works over the Internet and therefore across all distances.

Many walkie-talkies are put to use in areas where there is no Internet, and that’s a clear flaw in this feature which is sure to keep the old technology relevant for now. Assuming Internet though, having a walkie-talkie attached to your wrist instead of the classically bulky, phone-like devices on your belt seems much nicer. Having that walkie-talkie also be a smartwatch that can do a myriad of other useful things is another big benefit over the old single-purpose devices.

To be clear, I don’t think Apple is going after that market because the “walkie-talkie market,” if there is one, is certainly not big business. It’s interesting though to see Apple stepping into an industry that I don’t think has seen much innovation in many, many years. Walkie-talkies fulfill a venerable idea which isn’t utilized very often anymore. Maybe the relevance of that idea could rise once again if it were suddenly attached to hundreds of millions of wrists.

The Walkie-Talkie App

When you first open the new Walkie-Talkie app you’ll be greeted with the yellow icon and a block of text briefly explaining how it works. Scroll beneath the text and you’ll find your contacts list. To start talking to someone, pick their contact from the list and send them an invitation. They’ll get a notification on their wrist informing them that you’ve invited them to walkie-talkie with you, and their only options will be to always allow or to dismiss. Choosing always allow means that any time either of you has Walkie-Talkie mode enabled, the other will be able to speak through your Watch speaker at any time.

If you miss the notification or dismiss it and then change your mind, as far as I can tell you’ll need your friend to re-send it. This feels like a bug to me, but as of the watchOS 5 GM that notification doesn’t show up anywhere once its gone, not in Notification Center and not even in the Walkie-Talkie app itself. If you want to take the initiative then you can just send an invite to your friend. Walkie-Talkie is strictly a two-way street, so the one accepting the other’s invitation is also signing up to receive incoming audio at any time.

Once you’ve invited a friend and they’ve accepted, you’ll see a big card with their name on it above your contacts list in the Walkie-Talkie app. If you want to talk to them, just tap their card to enter an interface which is just the friend’s name at the top and a giant yellow “Talk” button occupying the remaining space. Tap and hold that button and you’ll be instantly streaming audio to your friend’s Apple Watch. Release the button and your stream will stop.

That’s pretty much it for the Walkie-Talkie app. The interface is light and easy like any good Watch app should be. If you have a lot of friends that you’re enabling this feature with, the giant card interface might start to get cumbersome. I think in general it will be a good idea to cull friends from there once the occasion that you require Walkie-Talkie for has ended. You can always add those friends back with a few taps the next time you need them to be available. To delete a friend in the Walkie-Talkie app, just swipe their card to the left to reveal a delete button.

Walkie-Talkie includes a simple launcher complication which you can add to your watch face to easily access the feature. That said, in most cases the complication should not be necessary because the small yellow icon that flashes at the top of your screen when you have the mode enabled actually acts as a launcher itself. In my experience the Walkie-Talkie icon always flashes first when it’s enabled, so if you raise your wrist and then rapidly tap it you can access the interface quite quickly. It flashes fast, so personally I’ve had more luck accessing it consistently by double-tapping the icon. Even though it only requires a single tap, it’s such a small target that tapping twice greatly increases my hit rate.

Walkie-Talkie Wrap-Up

Given its deep integration into the system, I think Walkie-Talkie stands by far the best chance yet of being an Apple Watch communication method that actually gains some traction. This is never going to be something that most people use on a regular basis, and it’s never going to be a standard way that we communicate with our friends. However, it doesn’t have to be a huge phenomenon to be successful.

Friends and giant emoji and Digital Touch were all trying to wedge themselves into our existing methods of communication, yet none of them were as good as existing methods. Walkie-Talkie is an entirely new communication paradigm. While it may seem like a simple feature, under the hood Apple has done some significant work throughout the system to enable this feature. I think this shows that Apple truly believes they’re onto something with it.

Walkie-talkies don’t need to be confined to campouts and multi-vehicle road trips. My sister got married this summer, and looking back on that day I keep thinking about how useful the Walkie-Talkie feature could have been to communicate across the large venue during the hours of setup throughout the afternoon. There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of texts flying around, but the day also involved changing into tuxes and dresses. Passing actual walkie-talkies around and keeping track of them would never have flown – it would have felt like overkill and been a strange annoyance. However, many of the people there were wearing Apple Watches. With watchOS 5 and Walkie-Talkie mode, communication could have simplified greatly with a minimal amount of preparation. That’s the kind of communication paradigm that gains traction instead of falling by the wayside. Walkie-Talkie has a variety of clear niche use cases, and if Apple can do the work to make sure people know the feature exists, I think they’ll actually utilize it.

Notifications

Notifications are one of the core selling points of the Apple Watch, yet they haven’t seen much change over the past four years. One of the few features that was done well from the very beginning, they’ve managed to hold up better over time than many other parts of the system. In lieu of the notification changes that Apple made in iOS 12, this may have been the first year that Apple Watch notifications started to look long in the tooth. Thankfully Apple was right on top of this, and notifications have seen a nice bump in watchOS 5 to keep them in step with their iOS counterparts.

watchOS 5 notifications are more interactive, supporting customized controls which enable user action without having to open the corresponding app. If a third-party app supports interactive notifications, it can reload the notification interface based on buttons pressed by the user. Apple recommends that developers keep these interactions fast and simple. If a user needs to interact more than two or three times with a notification then it may be better to push them over to the app itself instead.

watchOS 5 notifications also now stack just like iOS 12 notifications. This means that if multiple notifications from the same app come in at once, they’ll stack on top of each other and require a tap to expand them. I like this feature in most places on iOS 12, but on watchOS I haven’t found myself as enthralled with it. In general on my Watch I want to be able to easily see all of the notification I’ve just received. While Apple claims they’re trying to reduce scrolling with this feature, in practice they’ve actually just added a step to the process: before I can start scrolling through the notifications I’ve received I now need to tap to expand them.

I think the difference between iOS and watchOS for me comes because I almost always look at notifications immediately when they show up on my Apple Watch. On my iPhone I tend to let multiple notifications collect, so saving screen space by grouping apps is less of an annoyance. The Watch rarely receives so many notifications in a row that I feel the need to group some in order to streamline scrolling through the others.

Notification grouping can only be enabled or disabled on a per-app basis, there’s no global setting for all of them. Apple Watch notification settings default to a “Mirror iPhone” option for all apps, and notification grouping is part of this. Thus, if you have any particular apps grouped or ungrouped on your iPhone with iOS 12 then your Watch will mimic that, unless you’ve changed your settings in the past to not mirror your phone. All of these settings can be found in the Notifications section of the Watch app for iOS, so you can hop in there and tune things to just how you want them.

Web Content

Four years in, WebKit is finally making the leap to Apple Watch. Prior to watchOS 5, Apple’s smartwatch operating system did not contain the ability to load content directly from the web. Given its tiny screen and relatively slow data transfer speeds, I don’t think this has been particularly missed. With the advent of cellular Apple Watches though, adding WebKit is another necessary stepping stone toward the devices maintaining full functionality when disconnected from their companion iPhones.

Web content can be found in two main locations in watchOS 5: Messages and Mail. Now when your friends send you texts with links, you can tap on those links in the Messages app for Apple Watch to open them in a miniature web view. The Apple Watch attempts to specifically tailor web pages for the small screen. If a page supports Apple’s Reader mode then it will automatically be enabled, making text as easy to read as possible. Otherwise, the page will be loaded on the tiny display, and if the developer set up any media queries to target it then the formatting can lay out however they want it to. In practice this seems to work fairly well overall.

In Mail, web content is used to actually display formatted emails in full. Prior to watchOS 5, emails with formatted HTML content would just display as text with a note to try opening them on your iPhone if you want to see the full message. Now those messages can lay out directly on your Watch, making the Apple Watch Mail app significantly more full-featured and potentially useful.

All things considered, web content on Apple Watch probably won’t fundamentally change how we use our smartwatches in the way that it changed how we used our cell phones. The screens are just too small to make navigating the web convenient or inviting. Still, the web doesn’t have to fundamentally change the experience to be a great addition to the system. Now cellular Apple Watch users can feel even more empowered to leave their iPhones at home.

One other thing to note here: web content is only available on Apple Watch Series 3 and above. While that’s a bit of a shame for Series 2 and earlier users, it makes sense given the even slower data transfer and processor speeds on those old devices.

Miscellany

Apple is trying to pose its new student ID card feature as a headline addition in watchOS 5. While technology-wise it’s certainly interesting and ambitious, I’m classifying it as miscellany because it’s impossible to test and is only going to affect a tiny fraction of users.

To sum it up, watchOS 5 Apple Watches can now act as ID cards for a select few prestigious universities. This feature appears to be using the same technology as Apple Pay: readers will be set up throughout campus and students can simply hold their Apple Watches near them to connect. These readers will offer access to buildings and dorms, or charge payments to student accounts for laundry, snacks, or dinner. Apple is using the same technology with their employees to allow access to areas of their new Apple Park campus at an individual level.

This is an awesome use case for Apple Watch, and I think students at these universities as well as Apple employees are going to love it. The launch partner schools are The University of Alabama, Duke, John Hopkins University, The University of Oklahoma, Santa Clara University, and Temple University. For most Apple Watch users though, the infrastructure requirements for this means that it won’t be relevant to them for a very long time, if ever.

A more accessible new feature of watchOS 5 is the ability to schedule end times for Do Not Disturb mode. This addition is built into the Do Not Disturb button in Control Center on the Apple Watch (the moon button). In the past tapping that button would immediately toggle DND on or off. Now tapping it the first time will bring up a list of options: On, On for 1 hour, On until tomorrow morning, On until I leave, and On until end of event. The second to last will show your current address in small text at the bottom of the button, and the last will show you the title of any ongoing event you may have on your calendar. Using the schedule options will result in DND mode being disabled automatically at the specified time. You can of course always toggle it off manually via the Control Center button at any time.

The remaining miscellaneous items all showed up just last week with the announcement of the Series 4 Apple Watch. The new Watch models are going to feature larger screens with rounded corners, and the entire operating system has been updated to work within these loosened constraints. I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on a Series 4 Watch and seeing all the work Apple has done here. For the purposes of this review though, I’ll just point you to my Apple Watch Series 4 overview from last week. It goes into detail on the new hardware, and describes the six new watch faces that will be joining us with the Series 4 Watch.

Of these watch faces, four are also being released on previous Apple Watch models: Fire/Water, Vapor, Liquid Metal, and Breathe. All of these faces show simple watch hands with colorful, moving backgrounds. They support the same complication layout as the Utility watch face (two small upper corner complications and one large bottom one), and they’re all pretty boring overall. If you use the Breathe app constantly then you may like the new watch face that ties into it, but otherwise these feel more like novelty faces.

The other two new watch faces look fantastic, and offer more complications than any faces we’ve seen before. Since these are strictly limited to the Series 4 Apple Watch though, I haven’t been able to get my hands on them to test things out at this time. Make sure to check out that overview for more details on those faces and on what else to expect with the Series 4.

Conclusion

Between watchOS 5 and the Apple Watch Series 4, it really feels like Apple’s smartwatch teams have hit their stride this year. For the first time the operating system feels like it’s escaped the specter of its past mistakes and is forging forward unencumbered. The feature set of this year’s update strikes a diverse number of regions across the system, and iterates upon all of them rather than rebuilding from scratch. This is a sign of an OS beginning to mature, and watchOS sure feels like it’s heading in that direction.

Third-party developers are more empowered this year than they’ve ever been before. Their apps can run in the background as audio sources, their notifications can include rich interactions, and their shortcuts can be triggered via Siri and (in theory) displayed on the Siri watch face. Cap things off with access to the system volume controls, and we should expect to see a whole new crop of legitimately useful Apple Watch apps coming down the pike. The few I’ve beta tested bear this out, and I’m excited to see even more join over the coming weeks and months. watchOS is no longer a joke for developers, and that is fantastic news for Apple Watch customers.

On the fitness side of things, watchOS 5 brings a variety of smart and useful improvements. Runners definitely got the most love this year, but new workouts for yoga and hiking open the doors to new people. Everybody benefits from automatic workout detection, and I’m excited to see that feature continue to evolve moving forward.

The Siri improvements seem to falter in execution, but the declared features are all exactly what I was hoping for. Third-party apps on the Siri face and not having to say “Hey Siri” are both the right ideas. I hope other users have more luck with them than I have so far, but either way I’m sure by next year they’ll be closer to par.

Walkie-Talkie mode feels like Apple at its best. It’s a whimsical new feature that no one asked for or expected, executed impressively and baked deep into the system. This addition isn’t going to change the world, but not every feature has to. Similar to its namesake, I expect Walkie-Talkie mode to occupy a small niche of usefulness, but be invaluable in those situations where it’s useful. I just hope that by the time people are in need of it they haven’t forgotten that the feature exists.

For both hardware and software, 2018 feels like a turning point for the Apple Watch. The device has seen its first significant redesign, including a big new display that will give the operating system some much-needed breathing room. watchOS itself is still young, but the growing pains that plagued it initially have been put to bed. watchOS 5 marks the first unhindered step into a new chapter for the Apple Watch. I can’t wait to see how things progress from here.

This last decision always felt senselessly arbitrary, and indeed Apple finally reversed it in watchOS 4.3 last March. ↩

It’s worth clearing up any potential confusion regarding the term “shortcut.” When you hear “shortcut” you’re probably thinking of the new custom automations that can be built in the iOS Shortcuts app. You’re not wrong, but the term actually holds an even broader meaning. A shortcut is an in-app automation surfaced by any app on the system. For the Shortcuts app, the automations it’s serving up are the custom actions that you build within it. All other apps on the system can also expose their own shortcuts though. For instance, Overcast might send a shortcut which is an action to start listening to the latest podcast episode in a specific playlist. First-party apps generate shortcuts too, such as a Clock app shortcut which sets an alarm for a specific time. The Siri watch face will receive generic shortcuts from any first- or third-party app, but it can also receive "cards" which apps build specifically for the face. CARROT Weather sends the Siri face cards showing today's or tomorrow's forecasts, and lots of the first-party apps like Weather, News, and Stocks create cards as well. The face will pick from all available shortcuts and cards to generate the final list which gets displayed to a user. ↩