This fall, the Apple Watch is getting its annual infusion of features with tons of updates. Here are our favorite new abilities in watchOS 11.
Apple plans to release watchOS 11 this fall
Every year, most of the world’s attention turns to iOS, which is especially true this year with the addition of Apple Intelligence. But Apple’s handheld is also poised for a big year.
Live activities
On the iPhone, Live Activities were fully welcomed with the ability to provide real-time information on important events such as where your food delivery is, the status of a rideshare, or the score of a soccer match.
They now arrive on Apple Watch with watchOS 11. They appear at the top of the Smart Stack, above your other cards.
Speaking of Smart Stack, Apple has added many new cards that will dynamically display based on location, time, and other factors.
It will show you when rain is imminent, offer translation options if you’re traveling to another country, or Shazam when it detects music playing.
New apps for Apple Watch
There are two new Apple Watch apps this year – Vitals and Translate.
The Translate app is coming to Apple Watch
The latter makes a leap from the iPhone, offering translation capabilities for 20 different languages. It will listen to you and speak responses with user speed control.
Vitals is all new and (finally) gives us a visual way to see if many of the metrics the Apple Watch collects are within your normal range.
When you wear your Apple Watch at night, Vitals will summarize your heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, SpO2 levels, and sleep in the morning.
The Vitals app is new in watchOS 11
You’ll get a small chart with all these values, and you’ll get a warning if any of them are out of range with suggestions as to why they might be incorrect.
Training and fitness
As for fitness, Apple has decided that after ten releases, you’re now allowed to pause your streaks.
Beating streaks at WWDC is easy. But when we’re not on the field, we go to great lengths to keep our stripes, including pushing ourselves while sick or even in the hospital.
You are now allowed to have days off
We also lost a streak, due to silly reasons like an extremely long Apple Watch upgrade, snapping a streak of almost 1,500 days. You can now pause for any length of time, including vacation days.
In watchOS 11, you can also set different goals based on the day. Maybe lower calorie goals during the week but increase on the weekend.
Training load finally comes to Apple Watch
The training load is new, comparing your current performance with data from the last 28 days. It will highlight whether you are above, below or on track with your existing threshold.
Training effort occurs after multiple-choice training
After a workout, you get a new effort screen. For most cardio workouts, it will automatically choose an effort based on how it thinks you did, but you can adjust this manually as well.
Finally, Check In is directly integrated into Workout so it can start and stop with your workout. No extra step needed on your iPhone.
Dials
There are no new watch faces for watchOS 11, to our disappointment. This may be temporary, but we’ll have to see for sure in the fall.
However, Apple has fundamentally redesigned the face of Photos. It now uses machine learning to analyze the photos in your library, trying to find optimal photos to use, as well as suggest compositions.
Faces in photos look even better with watchOS 11
Users still have control over language, color, size, font, and placement, or you can let the watch handle most of them.
Availability and supported devices
These new features arrive on a variety of devices that include the Apple Watch SE 2, Apple Watch Series 6, Apple Watch Series 7, Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Series 9, plus the first and second generation Apple Watch Ultra.
You can expect a public release this September, along with Apple’s other operating systems.
