‘I can see clearly now, the apps are large…’ Don’t give up on your Apple smartwatch until you’ve tried it with watchOS 10.
Gather round, and I’ll let you into a little secret – until quite recently I was thinking about ditching my Apple Watch altogether.
I’ve got an old Series 7, which is still perfectly good to use, but I found I was using it less and less. It was useful for reading text messages when I couldn’t pick up my iPhone, but apart from that I didn’t seem to be getting much out of the old thing. Then Apple released watchOS 10 and everything changed overnight. Now I use my Apple Watch all the time. What was the secret sauce that Apple added to watchOS 10 that changed everything, I can hear you ask? Well, it made the icons bigger. As daft as that sounds, that was all it took.
Not only that, but in watchOS 10 each app has been redesigned to actually use as much of the display as it can. But really, it’s just the bigger icons in the interface that make the difference to me and my bad eyesight. Now I can actually see them without putting my reading glasses on. And once I could actually see what the icons were I started to use the apps instead of using my iPhone to do everything. Now I start timers on my Apple Watch, play and pause podcasts and use the calculator all from my wrist. I’ve even used the ECG app to test if I have atrial fibrillation (I don’t, thanks for asking) and I’ve discovered all sorts of fun stuff like the compass, Apple Maps and the Night Sky app for identifying star patterns. All of these things were there before of course, but the previous interface just put me off exploring and finding them. And if the new icons still aren’t big enough for you, you can also have your Watch apps appear in a list view, where you scroll through them alphabetically. I like this because it says the name of each app in nice, clear text next to its icon.