On Monday, Apple hosted its first in-person event since the pandemic and it was great to be back at Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino.
The WWDC 22 event kicked off with a keynote address covering updates including its upcoming:
They also covered the upcoming WatchOS 9 changes which seemed to be mostly polishes and fine-tuning accuracy. Here are the most important new features coming to Apple Watch.
Table of Contents:
WatchOS 9 brings new watch faces including world view with cloud coverage, lunar calendar, playtime whimsical numbers, and font changes. Think about it, a live animated astronomy view of earth with real-time cloud coverage sewn into the image. Wildly impressive.
Continuing with more personalization of the Watch faces, you can now pick the perfect look of your font by rotating the crown to stretch the look of a font in WatchOS 9. Other refinements show promise in areas of health, fitness, heart, sleep, and medication tracking.
- New Banner notifications will appear at the top of your watch screen
- You can now pin apps you use most at the top of your app list
- Workout app – add 3 new running metrics to track how you’re running (vertical oscillation, heart rate zones) custom workout to use distance and time intervals, it will alert you when you hit relevant zones
- Fitness app will be available for all iOS users
- Sleep app – sleep stages – you can find out how much happens in each sleep stage
- Heart health – if you have atrial fibrillation – WatchOS 9 can track how much your heart is in AFib (afib history, time of day when you have AFib). This provides greater detailed historic data for a cardiologist to get a better understanding of your heart and what could be influencing certain events.
- Medication Tracking – track, and manage medications with the help of Apple Watch. The medications app allows you to track vitamins, medications, and supplements and receive notifications to keep you on schedule.
- Grab your iPhone to scan your pill bottles to add to your medication list. You can build a list and use your iPhone camera to scan the bottle to enter. Apple is implementing a drug interaction safety alert feature. If you try to add a medication that conflicts with existing medications, you will get a warning. As with iPhone, health data will remain encrypted on your device for privacy and security.
Watch OS 9 will be available in Fall 2022.
According to Apple’s iOS 16 preview page, the following watches will be eligible for the WatchOS 9 update
watchOS 9 requires iPhone 8 or later with iOS 16 or later and one of the following Apple Watch models:
What features are you most excited about? Comment below!