WatchOS 3 might actually fix most of my problems with the Apple Watch

I make it a point not to install early betas of software on hardware that I use every day, but of all the software Apple announced at WWDC on Monday, the one that's tempting me the most is WatchOS 3. As many new things as iOS 10 and macOS Sierra both include, the next version of WatchOS is easily the biggest and most obvious improvement over the current one, and now that I've actually seen it in action on real hardware, it’s going to be hard to wait for.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my first year with the Apple Watch. I've come to enjoy wearing the device even though I remain firmly convinced that most people don't really need one. The things I complained the most about were performance (in general) and consistency (in particular). And some of the complaints I had in the original review, namely about the steep learning curve for new users and poor usage of the watch's physical buttons, still stood in WatchOS 2.0.

Let's start with the stuff that Apple has actually gotten rid of: Pressing the side button no longer brings up a Friends view, and swiping up from the bottom no longer brings up Glances. Glances were a decent idea in theory—fast access to snippets of information—but in practice they were hampered both by the watch’s speed and the way that its apps worked. The pauses while your watch and your phone communicated with each other to refresh the Glances made them frustrating and inconsistent, and it turns out that there's not really a need for a simpler, quicker version of a WatchOS app. WatchOS apps are already simple, so why make developers do the extra work?

The dock and the new background refresh capabilities in WatchOS 3 solve most of these problems, at least in the demos Apple showed and the beta I saw running on actual watch hardware. The dock is a series of up to 10 apps that you bring up with the side button, ditching the mostly redundant Friends view and obviating the need for Glances. Whatever apps you have pinned (and you can pin whatever apps you want in whatever order you want, though there’s also one spot for a recently used app that changes based on whatever non-docked app you used last) use Background Refresh to get rid of the visible pause that currently exists between opening an app or Glance and actually seeing up-to-date data. The watch and phone will still communicate and that’s still going to take time, but now it’s not happening while you’re waiting for your watch to do something.

We know very little about the Apple S1 and the other hardware inside the Apple Watch, so we don’t really know how hard Apple is pushing it or how many unused system resources there are inside the thing. But if the company has room to keep 10 apps running in memory all the time, it’s obvious that the hardware is being underutilized.

This is due in part to Apple’s emphasis on battery life, which needed to meet or exceed the one-day-or-so runtime that has for better or worse become the baseline expectation for the most feature-rich smartwatches. By most accounts, it hits that mark with plenty of life to spare—at the end of a 16-to-18-hour day, I almost always have around 40 percent of my battery life. Apple tells us that it has used some of this wiggle room to improve the watch’s responsiveness (another suggestion from us, not that we’re taking all the credit or anything).

Now that Glances are dead, that swipe-up-from-the-bottom gesture also gets more predictable and familiar—it brings up a Control Center much like the one in iOS. It’s one less new interaction you have to explain to new watch buyers, most of which should have at least a passing familiarity with how iOS looks and behaves.

These WatchOS changes are interesting in part because they change some pretty fundamental features of the watch instead of simply building on what’s already there (though the fitness features and app tweaks are in line with the gradual, incremental progress we’re used to from iOS and macOS). Apple is taking a risk, killing some features that people might already be used to in order to appeal more to new buyers, simplify the interface, and make things faster. This level of rejiggering isn't normal for Apple’s other platforms, but in this case, I think it's merited.

WatchOS 2, in retrospect, was just about getting the Apple Watch's software and development tools up to where they probably should have been in version 1.0. WatchOS 3 has the benefit of a year or so of actual user data behind it, and it shows. Apple had ideas about how people might or should use the watch, and now it's tweaking those ideas based on things that people are actually doing. And it's all stuff that I'm really looking forward to having on my wrist.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham