watchOS 26: The MacStories Public Beta Preview

Author’s Note: Apple released the public beta of watchOS 26 last Thursday, two days after developer beta 4. Instead of immediately publishing a preview of watchOS 26, I took the time to review the OS again to ensure my preview accurately reflected the version released as a public beta.

Last year, watchOS 11 emerged from the bumpy launch of Apple Intelligence completely unscathed due to the fact that it included precisely zero AI features. Instead, what Apple Watch users got was a fully formed OS update that took some big swings in addition to refining many areas of the Apple Watch experience. It was a good year with notable updates across the system, particularly when it came to the Smart Stack and health and fitness features.

It’s unfortunate, though perhaps not surprising, that this year’s new watchOS release – dubbed version 26, like its OS brethren – is what might be considered a quiet year. However, after living with the beta for over a month, I’m happy to report that while there aren’t any substantial new features, there are still clever flourishes here and there that make my daily use of the Apple Watch more enjoyable.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect from watchOS 26.

Liquid Glass

Comparing the design of watchOS 11 (on the left side of each pair) to watchOS 26 (on the right side of each pair).

First, the big news from WWDC: the redesign. Liquid Glass, as Apple made very clear, is a cross-platform design language that aligns each OS with the same visual style. While watchOS is indeed receiving a Liquid Glass makeover, it’s fair to say that, for the most part, it’s just a visual re-skinning of the UI.

That’s not a criticism, though. While iOS features numerous animations and transitions in its UI, watchOS is primarily composed of static buttons. There are elements of motion in places like the Smart Stack and when scrolling stats in the Activity app, but Apple has wisely decided not to mess with them.

Instead, buttons adopt Liquid Glass’ transparency with highlights around their edges. Control Center is more transparent, as is the Smart Stack, which adds a modicum of transparency to its widgets. It’s all subtle.

Out of the box, the design works well, and it doesn’t have any readability issues, unlike iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. One of the best ways to experience the fresh look is to create a new Photos watch face and observe the translucent time as it stretches and shrinks to fit behind the people and pets in your images, just like on the iOS 26 Lock Screen.

Workout Buddy

The banner feature in watchOS 26 is Workout Buddy. It’s relatively easy to explain, and I guarantee you’ll know very quickly if it’s for you.

Essentially, Workout Buddy is an AI-generated voice that provides you with periodic updates on your workout statistics as you exercise, along with motivational quotes that encourage you to “crush it”. I’ve turned it off because, while the comparative statistics can be of interest, the enthusiasm level of the voice is not for me. Yet, I know many who love it; as I said, you will know very quickly which way you fall. You can hear an example of the Workout Buddy voice in the WWDC Keynote here.

Either way, Workout Buddy’s implementation is intriguing. The voices (you can choose from three) are generated by a model that utilizes voice data from Fitness+ trainers, although no special recordings were made for this purpose. As someone who uses Fitness+ regularly, I’ve found that the voices have this bizarre familiarity to them that I can never quite put my finger on. They sound like generic Fitness+ trainers, which I guess is the intention.

Another intriguing feature of Workout Buddy is the way it will – in an attempt to seem like a real trainer – occasionally make reference to what you’re listening to. For example, it might say, “Enjoy your AppStories,” or, “Here’s a podcast about AI.” It’s weird, but again, I know several people who love it.

There is a major limitation to Workout Buddy that’s worth noting: you need to have your Apple Intelligence-supported iPhone with you to do the processing. This makes me wonder if we’ll see an AI-capable chip in the Apple Watch Series 11 this fall.

Other Workout Features

Scrolling through the list of workouts.

To me, the best new feature in the Workout app is the ability to customize workouts. For every exercise type, you are now presented with four buttons, each in a corner of the screen:

Metrics and Views

Experiences

Workout Buddy and Alerts

Media

What this allows you to do is customize these settings for every single workout, and I love it.

Settings for workout views and goals.

In Metrics and Views, you can select the different metric views that are available to scroll through during your workout. Experiences will enable you to kick off a workout with a preset target in mind, such as a 5 km run. Workout Buddy and Alerts offers options for enabling or disabling Workout Buddy, selecting a voice, and receiving alerts for your heart rate, time, and splits. If Workout Buddy is turned on, these alerts will come from your “trainer”; if not, they will come from your Siri voice.

Workout Buddy settings.

Finally, the Media button reveals some new ways to autoplay media when you start a workout. When toggled on, you can select ‘Picked For You’ or ‘Choose Media’. Picked For You chooses music from your Apple Music library based on the type of workout you’re doing. When I did a walking workout, my Apple Watch played my Motivated playlist; when I did a cycling workout, it played my Energy playlist; a yoga workout triggered my Chill Music playlist. You get the idea.

Choosing default media for a workout.

If you don’t want to leave it to Apple’s playlists to provide the soundtrack for your workouts, you can choose a playlist from Apple Music or a podcast from Apple Podcasts. Third-party apps can also get in on the fun by updating their apps to support the InPlayMediaIntent API.

Since the settings for each workout persist across multiple sessions, you could spend a considerable amount of time crafting the perfect setup for each type of workout that you do, and I think that’s fantastic. Apple appears increasingly keen on making the Apple Watch a tap-and-go device in various aspects of your life, and this is just another example. Great stuff.

Smart Stack and Control Center

Last year, the Smart Stack got some excellent upgrades in the form of Live Activities, interactive widgets, and suggested widgets. In watchOS 26, Apple is continuing to improve the Smart Stack by building on widgets.

The animation of scrolling to expand a Smart Stack hint is lovely.

Smart Stack hints are the most noticeable additions, and they’re nicely done. Using a new relevancy algorithm, the Smart Stack can draw from data such as the date and time, your sleep schedule, your location, and more to suggest a widget for your Smart Stack. You’ll see this suggestion first as a small circular icon at the bottom of your watch face. Tapping on it or scrolling up to reveal the Smart Stack will show the suggested widget at the top.

I’ve run into a few situations where Smart Stack hints were useful to me. The first was when I arrived at my gym and got a suggestion to start a strength workout. Another was when a hint to activate Do Not Disturb appeared just as I was about to start a meeting. The last use case is also the easiest way you can trigger this feature: I opened the camera on my iPhone, and my Apple Watch displayed a hint to launch the Camera Remote app. It’s great to know this hint will appear each time I open my camera in case I need to control it with my watch.

Developers can also take advantage of this new relevancy algorithm to have their apps suggest hints and add multiple widgets to the Smart Stack simultaneously. For example, you can include more than one widget for upcoming events in the Smart Stack if they are close enough together.

Configurable widgets for the Weather app.

Finally, in the Smart Stack, any app can now offer configurable widgets. This is an expansion of the single configurable widget that was available previously, allowing you to place three complications side by side. This way, developers don’t have to spend time creating numerous combinations of data widgets; they can simply allow the user to manually fill each complication-like slot with an option from their app.

With hints and customizable widgets, Apple is doubling down on the personalization and, thus, the usefulness of the Smart Stack. If you haven’t fully configured your Smart Stack yet, now is the ideal time to begin.

Control Center, as I mentioned last year, has remained unchanged for more than seven years and is still showing its age. Nevertheless, Apple has given it a little more utility this year with the addition of custom controls, similar to the controls you can add to Control Center on iOS. These controls can launch apps or perform actions within them straight from Control Center.

Adding new controls to Control Center.

Even though I think Control Center is well past due for a rethink, these custom controls put quick tasks like adjusting a home accessory, creating a new note (more on that later), or kicking off a shortcut just a button press away. I already run a couple of key HomeKit scenes regularly via Control Center, negating the need to pull out my iPhone or trust the unreliability of Siri. Again, as with all these new custom features, developers can make controls for their own apps as well.

Even though the primary focus of the Apple Watch for most people is fitness, the ever-increasing utility and convenience of the Smart Stack and now Control Center are slowly but surely empowering the Apple Watch to serve as a useful dashboard of sorts, easily accessible on the wrist.

Gestures

In a column for Club MacStories at the start of the year, I wished for more gestures to come to the Apple Watch, adding to the already useful double tap feature. Thankfully, my wishes were granted with the arrival of a new wrist flick gesture.

While looking at your watch (the feature is limited to Series 9 and 10 as well as the Ultra 2), if you swiftly rotate your wrist outwards and back again, the content on your screen will essentially be dismissed. Apple demoed the feature by using it to dismiss a notification and silence an alarm, but its usefulness goes beyond that.

The best way to think of the wrist flick gesture is as a ‘back’ button. For example, if you’re in an app, flick your wrist to return to the list of apps. If you have the Smart Stack open, do the same gesture to return to your watch face. It seems simple, but after a month of use, I’ve found myself performing this gesture a lot. It has the satisfying effect of allowing you to back out of something without needing to tap away on your watch or squeeze the Digital Crown.

My only criticism of this feature is that there is no API available for developers, unlike the one provided for double tap. I see why Apple hasn’t done this for now, as a wrist flick in an app will clear the app from the screen. However, I think it would be possible to string together some useful gesture combinations between wrist flick and double tap.

Notes App

Reminders has been on the Apple Watch since watchOS 3, so it’s pretty shocking it’s taken Apple this long to bring the Notes app along for the ride. The app itself is, unfortunately, very limited. In terms of content, you can only view your notes and check off list items; you can’t edit the text of notes themselves. You can pin or delete a note, though.

And you can create new notes in the app, too. You can also create a note by asking Siri to “take a new note” and then dictating the contents or by tapping the Control Center control, which will also give you the option to type your thoughts out.

I figured this would be a great way to capture thoughts both short and long, but unfortunately, during my month of usage, the Notes app has felt extremely restricted. The inability to edit notes sorely hampers it because every new idea needs to be recorded in a new note, which I find inefficient.

The length of a note is also restricted by system dictation limits - two minutes for on-device languages, one minute for languages not on-device. When this limit is hit, watchOS will cut you off and open the incomplete note it’s just created, which is very frustrating.

Other Notable Additions

Series 10 owners who love the seconds hand, rejoice! Almost every watch face now updates every second when dimmed, taking advantage of the device’s 1Hz refresh rate.

If you’re one of those people who have sounds on for your alerts, automatic volume adjustment is for you. This new feature automatically raises and lowers the volume of notifications, timers, Siri, and more based on the current ambient sound level.

Messages gains many of the features of its OS counterparts, like chat backgrounds and Live Translation. Additionally, smart actions prompt you to take action based on the context of a message; for example, if someone asks where you are, Messages will show a button for you to share your location. You can even vote in polls! Messages on watchOS has often lagged behind other platforms in previous years, so it’s good to see these new additions come to the Apple Watch at the same time as the iPhone.

Conversations in Messages now have custom backgrounds synced across platforms, and watch faces are now organised into categories in the gallery.

The Face Gallery has been redesigned in watchOS 26, with faces organized into categories. We’re also losing a couple of watch faces this year, including, to my dismay, the Toy Story face. The Mickey and Minnie faces are still available, so I’m assuming this is due to the license for the popular franchise expiring rather than any problem between Apple and Disney.

The Phone app gains Call Screening and Hold Assist, new features that also arrive this year on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. These are great additions that are easy to keep an eye on via a widget that appears in your Smart Stack.

As I covered earlier this year, Live Listen controls are coming to the Apple Watch, along with additional accessibility features like Live Captions. Simply place your iPhone near the sound source, and your watch will show a readout of the words picked up by the phone’s microphone.

I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a quiet year for watchOS; it undoubtedly is. Following last year’s significant updates, I’d hoped to see further developments in areas like the Vitals app and Training Load, as well as improvements to sleep tracking. I’m disappointed that hasn’t happened with watchOS 26.

That said, there are some clever touches throughout this update that make it clear Apple is still committed to enhancing the Apple Watch’s utility for users. The wrist flick gesture, the level of customization in the Workouts app, and the context-aware features in the Smart Stack and Messages are all small but very welcome additions to Apple’s smallest OS. Even Workout Buddy, though not ideal for me and a bit limited in functionality, will appeal to many.

Just don’t ask me to start “crushing my goals”.

If you want to test out these new features before they’re released this fall, you can do so now by enrolling in the watchOS 26 public beta. watchOS 26 is compatible with Apple Watch Series 6 and above, Apple Watch Ultra, and Apple Watch SE (2nd generation).