Apple calls watchOS 10 a “milestone update for Apple Watch.” I’ve been running the pre-release version of the software update for a few days now, and I think that’s a fair way to characterize it. Apple didn’t throw out watchOS as we know it and go back to the drawing board with a totally different idea. Instead, watchOS 10 revisits built-in apps with a design fit for modern displays and redesigns navigation to include a new widgets system.
Designed for the big screens
There’s a lot to like in watchOS 10 for Apple Watch. In addition to shuffling around what buttons and gestures do what, watchOS is also more bouncy and fluid while remaining tastefully constrained. The subtle way complications momentarily spring when your screen wakes from always-on mode to fully active is the right amount of playful. The app grid maintains its honeycomb-like roots, but a fixed width and a vertical scrolling flow brings order to the rebellious piece of chaos that drove many users to prefer the clunky list mode view.
watchOS 10 is also decisive in embracing vertical scrolling across the system. This approach matches the software behavior with the hardware movement of the Digital Crown. This is similar to recent versions of watchOS, only this time Apple has combined the sorting organization of horizontal pagination within apps to more information-dense vertical views. The result is paginated full-screen views that often use color to add character and a sense of place.
Managing mental health
That’s all well and good, but what about the general usefulness of watchOS 10? After a few days of running watchOS 10, I think I’ve settled on what my single favorite feature will be. But first, I have to give an honorable mention to a feature I’m already using and hope to find beneficial: mood and emotion logging. I talked on this site about how Apple Watch excels at physical health insight but has thus far been kind of clueless about mental health in 2019:
I first wrote about my health and fitness journey with the Apple Watch two years ago. The last couple of years have been eventful (to say the least), so an update is in order. I started 2017 on a high note, faced new challenges in my personal life that flipped my world upside down, saw the birth of my son, and moved my family to a new house.
My health and fitness journey and experience with running peaked in the spring, then I broke my healthy routines after a difficult experience over the summer that triggered a crippling depression — not the first episode I’ve experienced but the worst. Similar to physical health, mental health has long been something I’ve found difficult to manage throughout life for a myriad of reasons. […]
Mental health isn’t as easy to monitor as physical health, and in either category there’s never a single suite of best practices that works for everyone. […]
Mental health is as critical as physical health, if not more. Think of the mind as a muscle, even if the Apple Watch can’t measure its exercise in the same way.
Four years on, watchOS 10 has a response:
Mental health is as important as physical health, and research shows that reflecting on state of mind can help build emotional awareness and resilience. With the Mindfulness app in watchOS 10, users can discreetly and conveniently log their momentary emotions and daily moods. Users can turn the Digital Crown to scroll through engaging, multidimensional shapes to choose how they are feeling, select what is having the biggest impact on them, and describe their feelings.
In the Health app in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, users can see valuable insights to identify what might be contributing to their state of mind — whether it’s associations or lifestyle factors, like sleep or exercise. Additionally, depression and anxiety assessments often used in clinics are now easily accessible in the Health app and can help users determine their risk level, connect to resources available in their region, and create a PDF to share with their doctor.
I’m very encouraged by mood and emotion logging so far. What started life as the Breathe app has now bloomed into a more rounded app that lets you log how you’re feeling now and how you’ve felt overall in a day. You don’t have to be into breathing sessions or thought provoking visuals to benefit from the Mindfulness app on Apple Watch. I’ve also tried the anxiety and depression assessment available through the Health app on iPhone and iPad. I take medication for both and could tell that my answers were different than if I did not.
Truly, I love to see mental health tools and resources become part of iOS and watchOS without requiring additional apps to discover and download. I believe mood and emotion logging will help me, and I’m confident these tools will be beneficial for anyone who gives them a shot. A lot of people will be helped by these updates.
Steamy season
Something I suspect a lot less people care about still stands out as something I’m using every day and seeing every hour. It’s not as impactful as mental health, but it matters a lot to me. That’s humidity percentage as a complication from Apple’s Weather app. Seriously. I live along the Gulf Coast where humidity level is a better indicator of outdoor comfort than temperature.
In the summer, it’s always hot and how hot doesn’t really matter. Humidity, on the other hand, is a huge indication of how pleasant or miserable going outside will be: 90 degrees and 55 percent humidity is more my speed than 80 degrees and 85 percent humidity. Humidity has been a data point in Apple Weather for a while now, but watchOS 10 is the first version to include a watch face complication for it. Come to think of it, while we’re revisiting things I wrote last decade, there’s this from 2018:
Humidity data comes with Carrot Weather ($4.99 + $3.99/year subscription). That may be overkill for how I’m using it — purely to see humidity data on Infograph — but I like it. It’s often very humid where I live and 80º can feel very different depending on how muggy it is outside.
Apple’s Calendar and Weather apps could provide data for these complications, but it’s early days for Apple Watch Series 4 and the Infograph corner complications. I’m happy there are other apps filling the gaps.
The humidity omission is actually a bit more curious. Apple presents this data on the iPhone Weather app, but not on the Apple Watch Weather app; the only way to check without a third party app is using Siri. Air quality and UV index are new to watchOS 5 and make for pretty gauge complications, but neither are major variables where I live.
One, two, three, four, five years later … I’d say watchOS 10 is indeed a milestone update for Apple Watch.
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