If you use your Apple Watch with physical fitness goals in mind, most of these improvements should be very useful.
The Apple Watch is great for tracking activity and workouts, and with the upcoming update, it's getting even more useful features.
WWDC 2024 brought a variety of exciting announcements, such as new Apple Intelligence that will be included in all Apple devices, news about iOS 18 updates, and even upcoming home and audio improvements. But the watchOS 11 update may have the biggest impact on your activity levels.
Apple watchOS 11 will bring a ton of new features, including a new Vitals app and more ways to customize your watch. The Vitals app is probably the most exciting news to come. The app collects your health metrics and then analyzes them to give you an idea of your daily trends. The application will get a baseline, and then when two or more tracking metrics are out of sync, you will receive a notification explaining the factors that may have affected those metrics.
WatchOS 11 also gets a training load indicator. This metric uses the watch's trend data over a seven-day period to determine how stressful your workouts are on your body compared to the previous 28 days. According to Apple, this is a great way for athletes to track their training progress.
Workouts also get an "effort" rating, which monitors your activity and rates its difficulty on a scale of 1-10. Many preloaded workouts in watchOS 11 will automatically populate an "effort" rating, but if the workout you're doing doesn't automatically populate (an example of Apple's use of strength training), you can choose to enter the information at the end of the workout.
Data collected through the Vitals app, training load and effort ratings all work together, allowing you to view metrics simultaneously to get a clearer picture of factors that may be affecting your activity levels.
If you don't want Apple to track your activity, watchOS 11 will give you the option to pause your activity ring for a day, a week, a month, or longer. When you pause an activity ring, you're not penalized for streak rewards, and you can customize your activity ring goals by day of the week to match any activity schedule you keep.
In addition to activity tracking, watchOS 11 is also getting some new Smart Stack ad photo personalization features. With the update, the Smart Stack will be more customizable, you'll be able to add new widgets (like Photos, Shazam, or others), and watchOS 11 may suggest widgets it thinks are relevant to you. Some of these new widgets may also be interactive, so you can interact with apps directly from the Smart Stack without having to open the app.
The photo watch face has also received some improvements. Apple's machine learning can review your photos to find the best ones for your watch face, and even help you create a composition that suits your taste by adjusting layout, fonts, and more. A new dynamic mode also changes the photo you see every time you raise your wrist.
watchOS 11 also comes with some additional improvements to the Translate app, notifications (a really cool summary feature is coming soon), and Apple Cash, and you'll get the Tap to Cash feature that lets you just send or receive Apple Cash to your phone Apple Watch next to another iPhone.
These and other updates will target watchOS 11, which will be released in the fall and will be available for all Series 6 or later Apple Watches. The watch must be paired with an iPhone X or later updated to iOS 18 after launch.
