That said, for current watch owners, watchOS 2 improves nearly every aspect of the device. Additionally you can now set custom watch faces using your own photos, draw with multiple colors using Digital Touch and use your Apple Watch as an alarm clock with a new Nightstand Mode.
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Other than being able to have more friends, Apple has now made it easier to add them to your Watch. With certain watch faces – like Modular – you can now use the digital crown to roll forward or backward in time and see corresponding events in your calendar. I also haven’t been able to test updated third-party apps on the Watch yet – things like Strava, MLB, CNN, Facebook Messenger, and GoPro – because those are just rolling out now for watchOS 2.
For one, developers can now create applications that run natively on the Apple Watch, instead of simply off of your iPhone. You’d probably spend more time staring at the circular loading screen than whatever you were looking for from an app – not exactly what you’d want for a new flagship Apple device. Workout apps like Runtastic will be able to directly access the motion-sensing hardware inside the watch and have their workout data combined with your overall activity data, which means you get credit for working out no matter which Apple Watch app you use – provided it’s native.
Perhaps the most important change is that native apps can now run directly on Apple Watch, supposedly giving an uptick in performance, and apps can also utilise the hardware, including the heart rate sensor, accelerometer, microphone, Digital Crown and Taptic Engine.
The most significant change in watchOS 2 is also the least obvious at the moment – greatly expanded developer options. But even though the News app is not here yet, Newsstand has disappeared as an app, leaving any subscriptions you have in a new folder called Newsstand, with each magazine as a separate app icon. So expect lots of new experiences and vastly more interesting apps to hit the Store soon.
iOS users tend to update their devices quickly after a new operating system is released, with over half of the users having updated to iOS 9 in just 5 days from release. But those apps are just starting to appear.
My favourite new command to Siri is launching Apple Music. It still takes me a few tries sometimes before Siri actually starts listening for commands. It can also take advantage of the new “live photo” feature on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, which displays short video segments from before and after you shoot a photo. This will add more watch faces, faster and more powerful apps, and more ways to make the Apple Watch your own. You access watchOS 2’s preloaded Time-lapse faces by pressing down harder on your existing watch face until your feel the Force Touch vibration, then you can swipe though additional face options. Complications are small little pieces of information that sit on the face – meaning that the Watch can show updates like sports scores without clicking into apps.
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The Apple Watch is easily the best and most successful smartwatch on the market, but since launch, it has had one glaring weakness: third-party apps.
