watchOS 26: The MacStories Review

Last year was my first covering the watchOS beat with version 11. It turned out to be a trial by fire, with the annual software update for the world’s most popular smartwatch proving to be both sizable and significant.

While controversy reigned over iOS, iPadOS, and macOS regarding new Apple Intelligence features, watchOS took an exit off of that highway to a more peaceful, focused road that contained real, tangible updates. There were long-requested customizations to Activity Rings, as well as added power and functionality in the Smart Stack. Brand new features like Training Load and the Vitals app started to hint that Apple was maybe, finally, getting serious about, well, serious athletes.

If I’m being honest, I expected more of the same this year. The watchOS team seemed to be on a roll. Unfortunately, that hasn’t come to pass with watchOS 26, which – unlike watchOS 11 with Apple Intelligence – has been brought along for the ride with this year’s big controversy: Liquid Glass.

Can watchOS 26 handle this big UI overhaul and still deliver some tangible additions in this, the year of the Apple Watch’s tenth anniversary? Let’s take a look.

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Design

UI design on watchOS has largely remained the same in recent years. Even when we receive a notable change like what we saw in watchOS 10, it’s been more evolution than revolution, and the look and feel have always felt familiar. This year was a massive one for design on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, and the question was whether we would see any significant alterations to Apple’s smallest OS. For the most part, the answer is no, but not without a few twists in that tale.

Liquid Glass

On iOS, I fall into the camp of those who like the physicality of Liquid Glass but really dislike the legibility compromises. I find the pared-back UI attractive and occasionally functional; still, I struggle to support a design system that makes text and icons significantly less readable and, on occasion, illegible.

Liquid Glass takes a brief skim over most of the UI. You’d be forgiven if you forgot it was there.

In watchOS 26, Liquid Glass amounts to not much more than a re-skinning of the system, with buttons, widgets, and the like taking on shiny, reflective edges. There are none of the animations present on the other platforms, and the position of buttons, checkboxes, and other elements remains the same as on watchOS 11.

This seems like a wise decision. It was only two years ago, with watchOS 10, that Apple introduced a significant new design system for the Apple Watch. Going through another big revision this year would have been jarring, to say the least.

Liquid Glass on the Apple Watch is fine. It’s not adding anything useful, nor is it taking anything away.

It also strikes me that one of the key pitches of Liquid Glass – the idea that the UI vanishes into the background so you can focus on your content – is the exact antithesis of what the watchOS UI needs to be. The size of the Apple Watch necessitates a UI that is both clear and intuitive, with considerable areas of interactivity.

For the most part, Liquid Glass on the Apple Watch is fine. It’s not adding anything useful, nor is it taking anything away, and there are few transparency issues since the watchOS UI rarely sits on top of any content. It’s a visual change all the way down.

The new design is not without a couple of bad implementations.

One of the few exceptions is the passcode screen, and the result is, unfortunately, emblematic of the flaws with the whole Liquid Glass concept. The numbered buttons appear in all their translucent, Liquid Glass glory, and the numbers are white, which means that if you have a dark watch face, you should have no problem at all. The issue arises when you have a very light and detailed watch face, such as a bright image on the Photos watch face. In this situation, the numbers start to disappear into the background.

The same can be said for notifications. Again, if you have a dark watch face or if you’re using a dark app when you invoke Notification Center, you should be fine. However, if you’re using a bright watch face or app, then you run into a bit of trouble.

Is this a massive issue in the grand scheme of things? No, not really. If you type your passcode daily, you likely have so much muscle memory for this action that you no longer need the numbers. Notifications are still readable; it’s just not that pleasant to do so. In the end, it’s a failure in UI design and accessibility, but it occurs in so few places that it doesn’t affect regular usage all that much.

Watch Faces

Despite still refusing to give us what we want – nay, deserve – in the form of third-party watch faces, Apple continues its yearly tradition of introducing new designs to accompany the latest Apple Watch releases. This year, there are two new faces called Exactograph and Flow.

Exactograph is pretty nuts. In a good way.

Exactograph is made up of concentric circles, each displaying either the hours, minutes, or seconds. In this regular form, the design looks quite similar to the Solar Dial, Lunar, and Chronograph Pro watch faces, and I’m sure many people will enjoy it.

However, if you change the face’s style setting, you can make the two outermost dials (the ones for seconds and minutes) zoom outwards so that they are many times larger than the watch face itself. As the seconds and minutes pass, these dials rotate around the center axis of the watch face. That is honestly the best way I can describe it, and it still doesn’t give the proper impression. You can have a look at the example images above, but to truly appreciate this design, you will have to try it for yourself. And of course, you can customize it to your heart’s content with different colors.

I’m not sure that a lot of people will keep this face in its expanded form, but I suspect many will enjoy the collapsed version. Either way, it’s a pretty funky bit of design, and I was slightly hypnotized the first time I tried it.

Can you read the time on the left?

Somewhat predictably, there is also a Liquid Glass watch face, though for some reason, Apple has decided to christen it Flow. The background features a glowing heat map-style shape with the time displayed in big, bold numbers in front of it. These numbers refract the light, just like Liquid Glass does, which, regrettably, renders them slightly harder to read.

You can use the simple SF Rounded font for the numbers, but there is an alternative font that’s honestly quite bad. If you look at the image above, you will see a selection of screenshots I took at various times of the day. Can you work out what time it is on the far left example in under a few seconds? If you can, you have better vision than I do. Despite the option of having a black background and solid numbers, the Flow watch face is, unfortunately, a hard fail.

Liquid Glass is also prominent in the updated Photos watch face. This face works almost exactly as it did in watchOS 11: you specify the different categories (people, pets, nature, and cities) you want to see photos of, and the numerical time will poke out from behind various key elements of each picture.

The Photos face with Liquid Glass numbers is very hit or miss.

The twist in watchOS 26 is that the time will take on the translucent Liquid Glass effect. This works with varying degrees of success. If your background is an image of a mountain with a clear blue sky, the Liquid Glass effect works well. If you have a complex photo with an overly detailed background, the numerals become harder to read.

Is it illegible? No. But the whole idea of the time on a watch face is that it should be easily glanceable. If you have to spend a few extra seconds adjusting your eyes to read the time, it reduces the face’s utility. The good news is that you can turn off the Liquid Glass effect on the Photos watch face, returning it to watchOS 11 levels of legibility.

The great new Waypoint and Hermès watch faces. Source: Apple.

If you’re an Apple Watch Ultra user, you now have access to a brand new watch face called Waypoint, and it’s a doozy. At first glance, it seems like another chronograph-style face, but there are two big features that scream “outdoors”. The first is a circular dial just inside the compass that runs around the outside.

This dial features points of interest that change position based on the direction you are facing. They include the following items, which you can filter:

Waypoints

Map pins

Map places

Map routes

Map guides

Trailheads

Beaches

Parked cars

You can further refine what is displayed on the dial by limiting the radial distance of objects that will be included. For example, if you want to know the way back to your waypoint but not to your car, which you parked further away at the camp, you could adjust this setting to not show the vehicle.

The second prominent feature of the Waypoint face is an extra-large custom complication that can be located in the bottom-right or bottom-left corner. This can show any app complication as well as one of five specialized data points:

Compass

Elevation

Level

Last Viewed Waypoint

Parked Car Waypoint

I don’t have an Apple Watch Ultra to try this out on, but this seems like it would be a very popular watch face for those who go on long, complex hikes or follow intricate trails. It looks very cool to say the least.

Finally, for those of us with a bit of extra cash to spend on a Hermès watch band, you can enjoy the exclusive Hermès Faubourg Party watch face. The design features some animated pixel art reminiscent of early Apple Macintosh days, even including an old “paint can” fill icon. There’s a flying horse, a weird, rapidly growing vine, and more. Honestly, it looks nuts and makes me, for a fraction of a fraction of a second, want to get an Hermès watch to have this.

As Meatloaf almost sang: three out of five great new watch faces ain’t bad.

Health & Activity

After an initial false start where they heavily targeted the device as a fashion accessory, Apple has increasingly promoted the Apple Watch as a product to keep you healthy. The company is now pretty happy with saying, with no hyperbole, that the Apple Watch can and will save your life.

Those life-saving functions, however, are thankfully rarely needed by most of us. So Apple also continues to focus on new features and enhancements to watchOS that will help us improve our fitness, stay in shape, and generally feel better about our health. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Workout app.

Workout Buddy

The Workout app has a big new feature: Workout Buddy. It’s an AI-generated voice that provides you with periodic updates on your workout, along with motivational phrases such as, “Let’s get to it”, or, “You’re crushing it”.

It’s important to focus on that name, Workout Buddy, because the word buddy is key in differentiating the feature from a workout coach. This is not a personal trainer, nor is it going to give you workout-specific tips.

What Workout Buddy is here to do is provide you with motivation and running statistics. The three voices you can choose from are all trained on voice data from Fitness+ trainers, although none of the trainers specifically recorded audio for the feature. If you’ve used Fitness+ before, the voices will seem very familiar. The cadence and manner of speaking are similar to Fitness+ trainers in a weird, I-can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it way.

Workout Buddy doesn’t just quote stats and encourage you; it also references what you are listening to by saying things like, “Enjoy listening to First, Last, Everything”, (shameless plug) or, “Let’s get things going with your workout playlist”. It does this by accessing the title, artist, and genre of the content you’re currently listening to.

The big question is, “Will people like it?” The answer, I believe, will be very split. I know many people who have already tried Workout Buddy in the watchOS betas and love it. I also know many who don’t. I, unfortunately, fall into the latter camp.

I love Fitness+ and its trainers (shout-out to Kim from Hackney!), but their enthusiastic brand of training is always particular to the workout I’m doing. When they motivate me, it’s usually in reference to the all-out cycle interval I’m doing or the last rep of a strength workout.

Workout Buddy suffers from being built as a top-line statistics announcer, lacking the specificity that would be useful.

Workout Buddy feels too cheesy, too forced, and not natural (which is literally the case). Just the other day, I recorded a 15-minute walk to the shops because my Apple Watch prompted me to. After I got there and ended the workout, Workout Buddy declared it to be “great work”, adding, “Well done for getting out there and crushing your goals!” – which, for going to the shop to get a loaf of bread, seemed a bit excessive.

Workout Buddy suffers from being built as a top-line statistics announcer, lacking the specificity that would be useful. Everything that it says is about something in the past: your last mile pace, the distance you’ve walked this month, the progress you’ve made on your rings. I can already get a lot of these statistics from Siri.

There is one final flaw in Workout Buddy, and that is the requirement of a connected iPhone to function. You see, all the LLM work occurs on that device, not the Apple Watch. So if you want to go out for a run with Workout Buddy, you’ll have to take your iPhone with you.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned, some people seem to really like Workout Buddy. Not all features can be for all people, and this is a prime example of that. If you’re someone who can get value out of Workout Buddy, I’m confident you’ll know within the first couple of days using it. For the rest of us, there’s always Fitness+ or a motivational playlist with heart rate, time, and split alerts turned on.

Workout App

Despite Apple’s fanfare over Workout Buddy, the big news is really in the Workout app itself, with a clever design overhaul that allows endless customization of your workout preferences.

The first thing you’ll notice is the change in layout. Gone are the scrolling lists of cards containing different workouts, and in their place is a full-screen layout for each workout type with buttons in each corner.

The new Workout app design is a fantastic upgrade.

You can swipe or scroll with the Digital Crown to move to a different workout. However, this motion tends to be quite sensitive, so scrolling from one workout to the next can sometimes be akin to performing heart surgery, such is the gentle accuracy you need to maintain.

The big news is really in the Workout app itself.

Going from the top-left corner of the screen clockwise, the new buttons are:

Metrics and Views

Goals and Targets

Workout Buddy and Alerts

Media

Each of these categories allows you to customize the default settings for each type of workout, except for Goals and Targets, which lets you kick off a custom version of that workout type.

Metrics and Views

There are lots of different statistics you can show on screen while you are working out, such as average pace, distance, heart rate, active calories, and more. The Workout app offers a range of customizable templates, allowing you to tailor your workout experience – per workout type – to your preferences and display the statistics that matter most to you. You define what you want to see here.

Goals and Targets

Like the Metrics and View section, this is essentially unchanged from watchOS 11. Goal-based workouts for this workout type, as well as custom workouts and race routes, are displayed for easy access. You can create your custom workouts here, too.

Workout Buddy and Alerts

In this section, you can turn Workout Buddy on or off and choose the voice for it. You can also turn on alerts for heart rate zones, time splits, and distance splits. If Workout Buddy is disabled when you turn these alerts on, Siri’s voice will deliver them instead.

Media

You can choose any audio you want to play automatically upon starting a workout.

This section contains a new feature called Autoplay Media. With this enabled, your Apple Watch will automatically play media through paired headphones when you start a workout, unless you are already listening to something. You can choose what media to play by selecting a playlist from Apple Music or a podcast from Apple Podcasts. Third-party apps can also be used as sources here, but they need to adopt the InPlayMediaIntent API to be shown as an option.

If you’d prefer to mix things up with your workout music, you can select ‘Picked for You’. Then, Apple Music will choose one of its own playlists, such as ‘Energy’, ‘Motivated’, or ‘Chill Music’, depending on the type of workout you are doing.

Customization is catnip to nerds, but this way of specifying so many settings that can differ from one workout to another is fantastic. If you regularly partake in many different types of workouts, you could easily spend half an hour or so adjusting each one to your liking. It’s the level of customization that not just computer nerds like, but fitness nerds too, and it leads us nicely into some big news for Custom Workouts.

Custom Workouts

Apple announced custom workouts for the Apple Watch back in watchOS 10, giving users the ability to create custom intervals of the same workout type with targets like time, distance, pace, and more. It was great, but my goodness, it was so fiddly. Now, you can create these custom workouts in the Fitness app on your iPhone with iOS 26.

There is a spark for this change, but it also has an interesting knock-on effect. The spark is quite clearly the new AirPods Pro 3, which feature a heart rate sensor to track workouts whether the user is wearing an Apple Watch or not. The Fitness app on iOS now contains an additional tab that allows you to start a workout using AirPods Pro, Apple Watch, or – interestingly – any other Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor, such as a chest strap.

Workouts are now on your iPhone, and they’re just as customizable as on the Apple Watch.

One huge benefit to having custom workouts available on your iPhone is that they’re much easier to create, customize, and manage on the larger screen. They also sync with your Apple Watch, so any previously created workouts on your watch appear on your phone and vice versa.

An Apple Watch feature coming to another Apple device years later is very rare, and it’s even rarer for the company to make it immediately compatible with third-party products. It’s an intriguing development to say the least.

In the app, the different types of workouts appear in a list, with buttons to start a workout or adjust settings for media and Workout Buddy, just like on the watch. (And yes, these settings sync back to the watch too.) To create a workout, tap the Goals and Targets icon for the desired workout type. In the next screen, you’ll see a list of default workout variables to start, as well as any race routes you’ve saved or frequently followed.

Custom workouts can now be created on iOS, a much easier experience than making them on watchOS.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the list, you can tap the ‘+’ symbol to create a custom workout. The creation process works the same as on the Apple Watch, allowing you to specify warm-up, cooldown, and work intervals, as well as repeat values and custom names for each one. You can also share these workouts with other people, a feature that is currently somewhat hidden but should be more prominent.

This makes the Fitness app on iOS an even more compelling workout app that’s also totally free for users. In this single app, you can now track daily fitness goals, take part in a workout with a professional trainer, create your own customizable workouts, and see how your friends are doing with their Activity rings and workouts.

That’s not as feature-rich as several of the paid fitness apps out there, but it’s getting closer and closer, and for most people, it’s more than enough.

Sleep Score

Last year, with watchOS 11, Apple introduced the new Vitals app to track your average values for heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration overnight. Every morning, you can check if any data points were outside their normal range and use that information to guide your day. For instance, if your wrist temperature is a bit high, it could be a sign that you are coming down with something, so you might then approach the day more carefully, ensuring that you take care of yourself, avoid stress, and maybe take more rest.

You are provided with an extremely limited amount of context for your sleep score.

Although it’s not as informative as it could be, the Vitals app is helpful in spotting when I might be getting run down. It’s no surprise to see Apple expand on the feature this year with sleep scores. The problem is, once I dug into how this new feature works, I was disappointed to find that it’s not really much of an extension of the Vitals app at all.

After a night of sleep wearing your Apple Watch, you’re given a sleep score ranging from 1–100. That figure is calculated as a total of the following three pieces of data:

0–50 points for sleep duration and how much of that time is spent in deep sleep and REM.

0–30 points for the time you go to bed and how consistent it is with your normal bedtime.

0–20 points for the number of times you wake up during the night.

As you can see, only one of these data points comes from the Vitals app: sleep duration. The combination of these three pieces of data to calculate a sleep score is not uncommon. Still, when there are other products out there like Whoop and even third-party apps such as Sleep++ and Athlytic using data like Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Resting Heart Rate (RHR) data points to inform their sleep scores, it’s very disappointing to see such a generic approach from Apple.

One good aspect of this feature is that you don’t need to wear an Apple Watch to take advantage of it. If you use a Garmin watch or any other device that can input sleep data into the Health app, you will get a sleep score based on that information.

Despite having graphs, sleep score in the Health app isn’t much better than on the watch.

Sleep scores are also retrospective, so you can look back at your sleep score data for any night’s sleep in the past where you were wearing your Apple Watch or other device. I’m not sure why you would want to do this, but it’s nice to have.

However, the lack of context or follow-up advice is another frustration I have with this feature. If you receive a poor sleep score, the Health app doesn’t provide guidance on how to improve it; you’re left to figure that out on your own.

Overall, the feature is passable. There’s a growing trend of devices offering users sleep scores, and now the Apple Watch also does it. So sure, why not? The disappointment is that with data points such as HRV and RHR right there for Apple to take advantage of (as the aforementioned Sleep++ and Athlytic do), this take on a sleep score feels very undercooked.

Hypertension Notifications

An example of a hypertension notification. Source: Apple.

Hypertension is a form of chronic high blood pressure that often leads to heart attacks, strokes, and kidney disease if left undiagnosed. The World Health Organization says this disease affects over 1.3 billion people worldwide. The problem with detecting hypertension is that there are rarely any visible symptoms, and about half of adults worldwide who have it are unaware.

The only way to detect hypertension is to take multiple blood pressure (BP) readings over a period of time. The difficulty with this kind of diagnosis is that to take accurate BP readings, you need a proper cuff and monitor that you wrap around your upper arm. You could buy your own BP monitor and take readings every day, but that’s just impractical for most of us.

The new hypertension notifications feature in watchOS 26 aims to aid in hypertension diagnosis. Using data from the heart sensor on your Apple Watch, a machine learning algorithm works in the background to determine how your blood vessels responded to your heartbeats over the last 30 days. If the algorithm detects signs of hypertension, your Apple Watch and the Health app on iOS will alert you.

The onboarding for hypertension notifications is very smooth.

Setup is simple, involving a few steps to acknowledge you are over 22, don’t have a history of hypertension, and are not pregnant. Then it’s good to go.

Because these are not actual blood pressure readings, the alert will encourage you to use a proper blood pressure cuff to take readings over the course of seven days (the health app even has a BP logging feature) and then talk to your doctor. This approach is similar to the way the device handles AFib notifications, where the Apple Watch doesn’t actually diagnose you with an illness; instead, it prompts you to investigate further.

These hypertension notifications could well prove to be another life-saving feature.

This new feature was born out of multiple medical studies involving over 100,000 participants and validated with a decentralized clinical study. During the study, over half of the participants who had hypertension received notifications, and the percentage was even higher among those with the higher-risk stage of hypertension.

Interestingly, just over 95% of people in the study who were notified had elevated blood pressure, whether or not they ended up being diagnosed with hypertension. While these hypertension notifications could well prove to be another life-saving feature, that last figure really stood out to me.

The possibility of your Apple Watch being able to detect high blood pressure is a fascinating development, even if it’s not official and comes via a false positive hypertension notification. At the very least, it might prompt someone to consider their lifestyle, should they receive that notification but not turn out to have hypertension.

Hypertension notifications are available on the Apple Watch Series 9, 10, and 11, as well as the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and 3.

Interactivity

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

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

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

Smart Stack

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

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

The Smart Stack hint for the Camera Remote is easily triggered and very useful.

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

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

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

Smart Stack hints have a lot of potential.

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

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

Widgets can now be individually customized, like this one from the Weather app.

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

Control Center

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

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

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

Launching a watchOS app, optionally to a specific place in the app.

Triggering a specific action within a watchOS app – for instance, starting a HomeKit scene or kicking off a shortcut.

Triggering a control available on your iPhone, almost as if your watch is opening your iPhone and tapping the control in Control Center for you.

You can add a lot more controls to Control Center.

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

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

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

Gestures

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

The new wrist flick gesture replaces your other hand in many cases. Source: Apple.

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

The wrist flick gesture has been worth the wait.

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

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

Notes App

watchOS 26 finally sees the arrival of the Notes app on Apple Watch. Its productivity sibling, Reminders, has been available on the platform since 2016 with watchOS 3, so it’s astounding that it’s taken almost 10 years for Notes to make the leap. It also makes it all the more frustrating to see how much Apple has kneecapped the app on watchOS.

All you can do in the Notes app is on these four screens.

This will by far be the shortest chapter in this review, as the “features” of the Notes app can be laid out very quickly. First, you can view a list of all your notes, synced via iCloud with your other devices, with pinned notes at the top. Second, you can open a note, but you cannot edit or interact with it in any way except to check off items in a checklist that you will need to create on another device. Third, you can delete any note.

Could we have gotten a better experience?

The only additional feature is the ability to create a new note from scratch; however, this is also severely restricted. There are two ways to add text (you cannot add links, pictures, or lists on the Apple Watch): typing and dictation. I don’t anticipate many people using the former due to its slow speed. Dictation seems more promising, but it’s hampered by the watchOS dictation limit – two minutes for on-device languages, one minute for languages not on-device. Two minutes might seem like a long time, but in testing, I found that time passed very quickly, and it restricted what I could say.

All of this coalesces into the Notes app being useful for two things:

Viewing your notes.

Dictating a short note.

You cannot style text or add headings, so once you’ve created a new note, it takes the form of a single block of text, locked until you open it on another device. Did you get a word wrong, did you forget to mention something, or did your Apple Watch misunderstand you? Too bad; you have to redo it all in a new note.

I understand how the Apple Watch’s small interface might limit one’s ability to edit a note, but the idea that it isn’t even practical to let someone append text to the end of an existing note seems quite silly. I guess we should be grateful that we can now view notes on our Apple Watches, but boy, could we have gotten a better experience?

Additional Tidbits

The Messages app has taken on most of the changes in its counterparts on Apple’s other platforms. This includes message backgrounds, polls, Live Translation, and smart actions. Smart actions are prompts based on the context of the message you receive. For instance, if your friend asks where you are, Messages will surface a button to share your location. It’s great to see Messages on watchOS keeping lock step with the other OSes.

Likewise, the Phone app has done the same, gaining new features like Call Screening and Hold Assist that have been released this year for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Apple has thankfully rectified a big flaw in watch face refresh rates. Last year, when the Series 10 screen brought a 1Hz refresh rate to the Apple Watch for the first time, it was an exciting possibility to have the Always-On screen update every second, displaying the seconds on certain watch faces. Unfortunately, only the new faces that debuted alongside the Series 10 supported that capability.

Now, thankfully, that restriction is no more: all watch faces that need to update every second can do so whether the screen is active or the Always-On mode is enabled. This feature, of course, only works on the Series 10, Series 11, and Ultra 3 models.

A small change in buttons (left and center) and a new look for the watch face gallery (right).

The only other place where a shift in watchOS’ UI design is apparent is when swiping on list items. You can see this in the Timers app when you have multiple timers. Where most people will notice it, though, is in the Smart Stack. When you swipe to clear a suggested widget, the buttons are no longer squares with corner radii that match the widget; they are now circles. I like this change because, while the radius of the Apple Watch’s corners has increased, giving it a more curved look, these kinds of buttons have remained quite square, reminiscent of older models.

The Face Gallery has undergone a redesign, too, though it’s more of a reorganization than a new look. Each watch face is now placed under a big tab for a specific genre like ‘Health & Fitness’ or ‘Data Rich’. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but to some extent, it does help you find the watch face you want.

In some bad news for Pixar fans, the Toy Story watch face is no more. The reason for this removal has not been announced, and while I don’t use this face, I’m disappointed to see it go. After all, if we can have fun with Snoopy on our watch faces, why can’t we see Buzz, Woody, and Co. when we check the time?

Finally, as I covered earlier in the year, watchOS gains Live Listen controls and other accessibility features such as Live Captions. With the latter feature, you can place your iPhone near someone who is speaking and see the readout of what they are saying directly on your Apple Watch, which is very cool.

Conclusion

Going into this review, I had my conclusion solidified quite nicely in my head. watchOS 26 wasn’t a massive update, which made it easier to identify where the strong spots were, as well as the missteps – that was, until late last week when I discovered a new, unannounced feature that put a big twist in the tale of this year’s release. More on that shortly.

watchOS 26 is, in the end, a bit of a mixed bag. The trend of maximum customization on the platform, led in recent years by the Smart Stack, spreads to the Workout app, creating a great user experience. A small but clever feature, Smart Stack hints are a nice addition – when they work. The Control Center enhancements are also good, and I love the new wrist flick gesture. Heck, even the watch faces include three excellent new designs.

It remains to be seen, but hypertension notifications could prove to be an incredible new health benefit for Apple Watch users, saving even more lives. Even if it saves just one person, it’s hard to argue that the feature wasn’t worth it.

Unfortunately, on the other end of the spectrum, there are letdowns. The Notes app, it’s fair to say, now exists on the Apple Watch – except, it does little more than that in a weak debut that could have and should have been better. Liquid Glass isn’t a disaster on watchOS, but the few legibility issues are enough to be slightly annoying. Sleep score is half-baked and frustrating, considering how much better it could have been, and Workout Buddy feels like Apple trying to replace a human with an AI, but with all the limitations of doing so.

You’ll notice this rundown is all over the place in terms of the narrative of watchOS 26, and maybe that’s part of the problem. While adding features across the platform isn’t an issue per se, when some of those features – Notes, sleep score, Workout Buddy – feel incomplete, you have to wonder whether a more focused approach in two or three areas would have been better.

Then again, all of the missteps this year haven’t damaged any existing experiences, while the successes have boosted already solid areas such as the Workout app and Smart Stack.

If it sounds as though I’m struggling to reach a clear conclusion, that’s because I don’t think there is one, which matches the mixed experience of using watchOS 26. When three headline features don’t pass the smell test, it’s hard not to be disappointed. Nevertheless, the successes outweigh the failures, and when everyone gets their hands on this update, I think those successes will be what they notice most.

The Twist

Late last week, I discovered not only that all custom workouts were coming to the Fitness app on the iPhone (something that Apple didn’t talk openly about at the event on September 9), but also that it seems you can use them with any Bluetooth heart rate tracker.

I may be off base here, but I previously saw this as a significant line in the sand that Apple wouldn’t want to cross. While you could do workouts in the watchOS Workout app with a chest strap, you always had to pair it to an Apple Watch. Using AirPods Pro instead of an Apple Watch seemed like a logical expansion of that process for Apple.

“A device with a heart rate tracker” in the Fitness app is quite a step forward for Apple.

However, the Fitness app’s ability not only to create full, custom workouts and use race routes, but also to connect to third-party devices (such as chest straps), marks the first time the company has let non-Apple products cross that line in the sand and be used in an Apple workout without the Apple Watch.

Part of me wonders whether this is the first sign of Apple opening up its Fitness offerings to be truly cross-platform rather than an ecosystem lock-in. Or maybe it’s just one little concession, and Apple will continue to keep users tied to the ever-powerful Apple Watch world. Either way, I’m going to be keeping an eye on this.

Well, I’m off to further tweak the settings for all my different workout types. You should, too.

Special Thanks

It’s been a less intense year for watchOS, but I couldn’t have written this review without these awesome humans (and two felines):

L&L, my girls. You’re the best people ever. Thanks for the love, support, and cuddles.

Nina and Ella, thanks for the most needy cuddles two cats could give.

My family, and in particular my parents, for always supporting and encouraging me. I said it last year, but thanks, Dad, for introducing me to a Macintosh 30 years ago.

Federico and John, for your patience and support in not just my writing, but also my podcast (second shameless plug!).

Devon, you’re the nicest person I know online and the best editor a guy could want. Cheers!

Niléane, my MacStories teammate!

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

Everyone on the Apple Watch team at Apple. You’re some smart people!

Every Club MacStories member for supporting everything we do here.

Our amazing Discord members; the friendliest bunch of people on the Internet.

And of course, you, dear reader. As we all know, the credits are the best part. Since you’ve made it this far, here’s an Apple gift card.