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At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced small but significant updates to watchOS 11.
This year is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Apple Watch, and rumors abound that we will see a major redesign of Apple's wearable this fall, with a new suite of health features that may include blood pressure monitoring and sleep apnea detection. This summer's update doesn't include that stuff, but it does include the new Vitals app, as well as a comprehensive algorithm called Training Load. These features, combined with new partnerships with the real-time glucose monitor Dexcom, make the watch a more comprehensive health monitoring device.
The new capabilities come along with other upgrades, like a redesigned Photos face and updates to last year’s Smart Stack, which lets you scroll through your widgets more easily. Here, we break down the operating system’s top new features. And as always, don’t forget to check out our guides to the Best Smartwatches and the Best Fitness Trackers.
Is Your Apple Watch Compatible?
WatchOS 11 is compatible with the Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) and newer. However, you will need an iPhone XS or later that runs iOS 18. Not all the features listed here will be available on every watch.
When Will WatchOS 11 Be Available?
The developer beta is currently available to people enrolled in Apple's developer program. The public beta will be available soon as an optional free software update for users of the Watch Series 6 or newer. The final version of watchOS 11 will roll out this fall to everyone.
Top WatchOS 11 Features
Most of the top new features are listed here, but check out Apple’s guide for the full list.
A New Vitals App
Heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and blood oxygen (well, maybe) are just a few of the important health features that the Apple Watch currently monitors. A new Vitals app in WatchOS 11 lets you quickly view those metrics at a glance in a tidy dashboard. The app also lets you know when those numbers drift out of a safe range, using real-world data derived from Apple’s Heart and Movement study. If your numbers drift too high or too low, Apple will send you a notification to check whether you’re sick, drank some wine last night, or doing something else unhealthy.
One of those behaviors (ahem) may result in pregnancy, which is why Apple is also launching a new pregnancy feature in the Cycle Tracking section of the Health app. Cycle Tracking will now also let users record the gestational age of a fetus, as well as monitor other data points that can provide insight into a mother's health during a pregnancy, such as their heart rate.
Training Load
For the past several years, Apple has included more and more granular fitness features into its watch. These advanced features are intended to allow the Apple Watch to better compete with Garmin’s premium outdoor sports watches. One big hole in Apple’s feature list? A comprehensive algorithm, like Garmin’s Body Battery or Fitbit’s Daily Readiness, that helps wearers understand what to do with all that granular data.
At WWDC, Apple announced Training Load, which measures how the intensity and duration of your workouts impact your fitness over time.
Training Load takes into account calorimetric data like heart rate, pace, and elevation, plus personal data like age and weight. If you're doing a popular cardio workout while wearing your watch, the wearable can automatically generate a 1 to 10 effort rating score. Otherwise, you can input your own effort rating by choosing a number between 1 and 10. Apple then generates a 28-day Training Load score that will let you compare your past month of workouts to the past seven days to see if you’re improving for your next goal, whether that's a 5K or a marathon. You can also manually adjust this estimate to account for factors like soreness or illness.
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You can access Training Load in either the Vitals section on the Activity app on your watch or in the Fitness app on your iPhone. It’s also worth noting that Training Load is not an original concept that was invented by Apple; watches like those from Garmin and Coros already provide a training load score to let you know whether your performance is improving or decreasing.
Rest Your Rings
Apple’s activity rings, which Apple Watch users fill in over the course of each day by staying physically active, are one of the most popular and easy-to-use fitness features on the watch. Failing to close those rings each day can be a source of anxiety for many, and most Apple Watch users are devoted to closing them before bed, always and forever, in order to maintain their fitness streaks. (You could always tap on an unclosed ring and adjust your goals downward to fill it in, but that's cheating.) New in watchOS 11, you can pause your activity tracking to take a rest day, week, month, all without affecting your fitness streaks. (Just to note, this is a feature that's already on other trackers, like the Oura ring.)
The Fitness+ app has also been redesigned to be more easily customizable and let you study some of the new fitness metrics in your iPhone. That includes a personalized For You space, Explore and Library spaces, and new awards. There are also even more workouts that use GPS, like soccer, football, and snowboarding. You can now make custom workouts for pool swims.
Check In
If you play or practice an outdoor sport, like hiking or running, your family and friends might have gotten nervous every time you went out alone—especially at night. Now you can ease their worries with Check In, a new feature that debuted in iOS 17 that not only tells your loved ones when you arrive at a location, but also sends you safety prompts if you don’t arrive. You can now Check In directly within the Workout app on the Apple Watch or via the Messages app on your watch, the same way you would on your phone.
A New Smart Stack and Photos
Last year in watchOS 10, Apple introduced a feature called Smart Stack. Instead of trying to scroll through tiny apps to find the one you want, you could scroll through bigger widgets on the face of your watch within a Smart Stack. It's the “smart” part that made it more helpful: The most important widget was automatically brought to the front, depending on the time or your location. Now Smart Stack has added even more widgets, like Shazam and Photos, that can be shuffled through.
New widgets are also interactive, and your Live Activities will also appear in your Smart Stack. The Translate app will show up in your Smart Stack too, so you can access translation for up to 20 different languages in the watch. The app also offers romanized spellings so you can pronounce words in languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet.
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A redesigned Photos face also lets you use Apple’s machine learning capabilities to scroll through your Photos library to find your best photos, taking into account composition, aesthetics, and all sorts of other factors that you might not otherwise have known were quantifiable. The watch automatically positions the photo to create depth and drama, and you can personalize the layout of the watch face by choosing fonts and where to place the clock. There's also a dynamic setting that pulls up a new photo every time you raise your wrist to wake the watch face.
AI or No AI?
Apple listed many smaller software updates coming to the watch—new ways to use Apple Pay, Apple Maps, and more—but the biggest announcements at WWDC centered on the new artificial intelligence capabilities being built into all of Apple's devices.
However, very few of the hotly anticipated generative AI features will be making their way to the Apple Watch. The closest integration is summarized notifications, which will be forwarded to the watch from your phone via Apple Intelligence. And when I say “your phone,” I really mean a compatible iPhone; Apple's AI features will run on only the latest mobile hardware, so you'll get this watchOS 11 feature only if you have an iPhone 15 Pro, an iPhone 15 Pro Max, or one of the new iPhone models coming this fall.
