Full transcript of “watchOS 26 - 55 New Features & Changes!”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 How's it going everyone? So, after spending several days, hours, maybe over 300 hours by now with Watch OS 26 installed on my Apple Watch Ultra, here's the rundown of 55 new features and changes that I noticed that Apple integrated on the Apple Watch that they didn't mention during their keynote. Let's go ahead and start off with the new flip gesture. The cool thing about this new flip gesture is basically a newer version of the double tap. this old school functionality. Well, it's not really old school, but this feature has been redesigned because now you can just simply do this and it will always take you to your watch face. So, if you're a notification, you do that watch face. Receive an incoming call, do that, dismiss it. Alarm, dismiss it. It's super convenient and I find it to be extremely useful, especially when you
0:45 have both your hands occupied and if you're holding your hand to your significant other, as an example, instead of doing the pinch gesture, which is obvious what you're doing, doing the simple wrist rotation like this, it's a lot less odd in public. And if you go into your Apple Watch settings and then you scroll down to the gesture tab and here, scroll down, you'll see that flick gesture, wrist flick. You can enable it or disable that. So, it's great that Apple did gave us a setting to disable that if we decided we don't need it. Now, if you look closely when operating your Apple Watch, the animation will actually peak to the watch face. This is similar to what we've seen with iOS 18 where before a simple press on the buttons will cause the animation to like
1:31 move and stuff like that. This also includes like the volume knob and such. You can do the exact same thing now. Well, you can see the exact same experience on the Apple Watch. Now, a little hidden update right there. This also applies with the action button, too, if you have an Apple Watch Ultra. Now, I don't know if you looked, but we did receive the UI, the glass UI update across the entire Apple Watch. Everything from the notifications to the apps as well. The setting app features a glass look as well, the liquid glass, and so much more. But where you definitely see the new update can be located in control center as this is how the new control center layout looks like as I previously covered in my first video. But the UI also has been overhauled by now. selecting edit and
2:17 tap plus. This is where you continue to add more custom icons to control center. But if you look closely, it now supports third party apps. And this also supports vehicle control, too. So, I could control my F-150 from here. And if you have a Tesla, you can also control your Tesla. Or if you have like a power bank in your wall, you can also control your house power bank from here. And on the very bottom, you can see I could toggle my AC control right here on my Tesla as well as lock or unlock my vehicle and so much more. It even supports smart home appliances and accessories as well. You see, by going into edit and we tap plus, if you go to the very bottom, you'll see the home app. You could do things from scenes to control your home accessories
3:03 and then you can manually choose your accessories. You can also program robot vacuums from here as well. So, I got my smart door locks, my lights, you even have the search ability. So, if you're missing some of the control center icons, you just need to tap edit and tap plus, and you'll likely find it right here. Everything from like camera control as well. Additionally, in control center, if you tap the battery life percentage of your device, there's now a new column down here, which will also monitor the battery life condition of your other Apple devices are nearby. Now, SmartStack also received a new update as well where it now supports Smart Stack hints. One of the most useful ones that I typically find myself using the most is whenever I launch the camera app on my iPhone and launch it like so. If I look on my
3:49 watch, a little shortcut hint icon will pop up here telling me I can tap on it. It'll take me to Smart Stacks and then I can tap on it one more time. It will give me quicker access to my camera control, which then I'll be able to use the Apple Watch as the viewfinder. But it simply doesn't just do that. Whenever your iPhone detects it loses reception, it will tell your Apple Watch that you are off the grid and you'll see a hint right here for backtrack capability. So, you can just simply just tap on here and then just go in to start doing a backtrack. It does it independently and it's smart enough to detect if you're connected to like an elliptical or if you're using one of those NFC gym equipments. It can also do work that way as well. It works phenomenal. And if you like to see additional settings, there
4:34 is settings for smart hint ability in the settings app and scroll down to smart stacks right in here. And where it says widget suggestions, this is where you could select. And then you'll find the smart stack setting right here, which you could enable or disable if you don't plan on really using it. And real quick, if you've been enjoying this video so far, if you could take two seconds to kindly hit that like button and like, truly appreciate those as strongly support the channel. And I prefer my channel be driven by you guys, the viewers, which is why I don't like accepting brands for like a sponsorship for a VPN or something like that. That takes up like a minute or two off your time. I'm also a viewer when it comes to watching videos on YouTube and sometimes those are kind of annoying, which is why I prefer not to do that. So, big thank you to those that continue supporting the channel by just hitting that like button. Really does mean a lot. Thank you so much. Let's carry on. Now, as I
5:22 previously stated, Control Center features a lot customization than there before. If you end up adding a lot of stuff and you want to reverse everything, there also is a setting for that too. Now, as now there's a control center setting. You can locate in the settings right here on your Apple Watch and you have the ability to reset the entire layout. Now, a new app that was recently added is the notes app that is now officially available on the Apple Watch. This is something that's well overdue, very similar to like the calculator app how it used to not be available on the Apple Watch. Now you have the native note app for Apple and this will automatically synchronize on your notes on your phone to the Apple Watch and then whenever you create a note here it will immediately use dictation and it'll immediately begin
6:07 transcribing everything onto the notes app and you can just tap done. Of course you can reverse back to keyboard or scribbles if you like but dictation to my experience has been working extremely well. Now the note app also has a new complication as well. So, if you like to use a watch face, you could tap edit, select the complication and just scroll until you find N for notes. And this is where you'll find a quick shortcut to your note app from here. You can also program it to be a part of your control center as well. If you scroll down, there it is, the note app. I can simply tap here, it'll quickly launch my note app. Another new app that was added is the workout app. Well, it hasn't been added. It's just got a a massive UI overhaul. by launching the workout app. This is a new UI and it'll automatically use Siri intelligence to like suggest
6:54 what kind of workout you're likely to be selecting. And then again, you can use the double tap gesture to toggle between the different workouts that you have. But whenever you select one on the top corners, you will notice there's new shortcuts down here. Here in the very bottom is your notifications which also gives you access to your workout buddy which uses AI to encourage you to push on or you achieve this or good job on your walking spree and stuff like that. It's all done by AI and you have two voices to choose from. So here's a preview on how voice 2 sounds like. Way to get your workout started. And here's voice one. Way to get your workout started. Again, these are AI voices which all correlate to the music that you're listening to. So when you start a workout, let's get this workout started. listening to Daft Punk as an example. It will literally start a workout like
7:40 that. And then it also tell you like, "You have been on a solid spree in the last three days. Let's keep it up." It does that type of thing. And then if you find them to be annoying, you could always disable it. I actually find them to be comfortable. I thought I was going to be annoyed with them, but they're pretty good. But you could go down and continue on adjusting the alerts. If you like your workout buddy to notify you if you're below a certain heart rate, you can do that. Your times, your splits. But right now, target alerts is what's enabled by default. And I think that's more enough for everybody else. So that's pretty cool. And then on the other side, this audio note by selecting here, you can allow Apple to automatically suggest music when you start your workout. You can do a choose your current playlist or music library,
8:26 or you can let Apple suggest the song you like to listen to based off your listening habits. So now whenever you start a workout, it immediately will start playing music that you are likely to enjoy. And to my surprise, it's actually been pretty consistent. Now on top of here is other goal settings you could adjust. You could customize certain things such as add a timer, distance, uh same stuff we had access to in the past. It's just located in a different place. You can also do custom categories as well. And then on the top left over here with the note icon, you can now finally edit the metrics on which type of metrics you like to see whenever you start a workout. You can include heart zone instead, segments, and splits, elevation, just more customization
9:12 ability. You can also change the order, too, cuz these are the ones that we typically see when we start a workout. But it's pretty cool that now you can actually tap edit and decide what you want to see and what you don't want to see with these different metric watch faces or screen faces I should say. Now if you're like me who constantly has their device on silent now you don't have to do that. If you're somebody who likes having your notifications on loud, you know how the Apple Watch used to just been loud. There wasn't really a volume slider or anything like that. Now there is. Thanks to this new latest update, it's able to detect your current ambient levels and adjust its notification audio to the environment you're in. So, if you're in a library and it knows the ambient lo level levels are low whenever you receive a notification or you're talking to Siri, it's not going to respond to you or be
9:59 super loud in those quiet environments. It's able to adjust all this. You'll be able to find this new setting in the setting app on the Apple Watch and then scroll down to sound and haptics in here and go down to where it says automatically adjust volume. This is that new setting you could enable. If you disable it again, you could override it, but something you may find it to be too low or too loud in certain environments. But then on default level, you can also allow it to be quieter. So you still have the ability to actually select a certain level you like it to be. and I already used it quite a few times and I'm very impressed. I'm also more impressed with the Siri response as it's not loud anymore like it used to be, especially if you're indoors asking it a question. But outdoors at max loudness, that's ideal. Now, other apps
10:46 that receive an update is the message app. That's a cool update on the message app is that you could customize the wallpaper on your group chat. And to perform that is as easy as literally just tapping on the group chat name and then select backgrounds and you can select some custom ones from suggestions down here based off your photo library or you could use Apple intelligence to generate some unique ones for you as well. Here, let me lower the brightness for you a bit so you can see that better on the camera. And then if you do like polls as an example and we send a poll to like vote in the group chat, you'll see that vote poll also get added in the message app on the Apple Watch as well and you can start voting like so and
11:33 it'll adapt in real time. Live translations is also supported on the message app on the Apple Watch as well. Then the phone app also received a UI update as well as now you have your top fours on top. It's also more organized than ever before, but you still have access to your number dial. And of course, you have your filters up here for your voicemail spams and all that nonsense. And then when receiving an incoming call and you answer, it also supports screening if you don't want to pick up a call. But then on your main device on your iPhone, you could tap more right here on these dots and select hold assistant and it'll automatically notify your watch when you're no longer on hold. And it even tells you right there on the smart stacks and it will begin ringing your wrist when your hold is done. Now, if you look closely, it's also doing the live screen right there
12:19 during the phone call. Now, when it comes to watch faces, unfortunately, there was no new watch face added on this version of iOS watch OS 26. The only update we received was the photo app, which now resupports the glass clock icon update. But if we add a new watch face, you'll notice that everything is now fully categorized. But if you like to go back to the old look, you can always scroll all the way down and select all watch faces. You see the native watch face app for the Apple Watch has a error message, which I'll look at in a little bit. But if we get out of here on the very bottom, it also supports the liquid glass update. So whenever you hold this looks more like water, but it's liquid glass. It has that UI update, including all the icons.
13:05 But in watch faces is what I want to show you. You can see that the everything is now fully categorized like how it is now. It's better organized than before. Of course, you can select all watch face and it'll take you to the old school look. But the only new watch face again that got added was the photo watch face, which all it really was was an update. But if whenever you select shuffle, this splash screen will pop up. And if you look closely, you can now select featured. Before we did not have that ability, just unfortunately, if you were a fan of these five watch faces, they seem to have been officially removed on watch OS 26. So, we lost the fire and water, the granite, the liquid metal, Toy Story, and Vapor, which three of these were my favorite. I like the liquid metal Toy Story and the fire and water one was my favorite. I prefer
13:50 consumers to have options. It's a darn shame that these got removed. Even though they weren't the most popular ones, there were still options for the consumers. I don't have an explanation why Apple decided it would be a good idea to remove something that already existed. However, a cool feature that did get added on older model Apple watches is if you have a series 10 Apple Watch, the second hand will now show with always on display on the California watch face as well as the utility watch face. transcriptions. And then if you use live listen transcriptions, when you use live listen on your iPhone, a transcription of what the iPhone records will be sent to your Apple Watch, so you can read what's being said at the time. So that's a look of what we have so far in terms of everything new and everything that got added during this latest version of
14:36 watch OS 26 developer beta. I'll be sure to continue to keep covering more updates as soon as we get the other betas in the near future. So, make sure you are subscribed so you don't miss that. If you ask me if it's worth updating this on my main device, it's not. It's a developer beta. It's going to have bugs, going to have issues. There's been countless times where my watch failed me and had to reboot to resolve a problem. So, if you're okay with that annoyances, that's on you. You're an adult. I'm sure you're wise enough to make that decision. But, it's a developer beta for a reason. But sometime in July, we will receive the public beta and the official release of course will be released to everybody else during the fall time. Usually around the time of like the next generation Apple watches and iPhones. Other than that, there you guys have it. Feel free to leave me any questions if you have about watch OS 26 in the
15:23 comment section and I'll try to get back to you. If you enjoyed, I greatly appreciate if you guys leave this video a like. Those really help out the channel. and get subscribed for more updates on the Apple Watch, iPhone, and everything else that we known and love. I'll be sure to bring out updated videos as we progress with future updates with Apple. Now, if you missed my previous video of everything new on CarPlay, I cover that in this video where I go through all the new changes and upcoming features that a lot of people miss. And the video down there is everything new on the TV side of things on Apple TV OS. I cover everything in there as well. Thank you so much for watching.
