WWDC 2023 is approaching and with Apple fans starved of event hype since the launch of the iPhone 14 over eight months ago, expectations are high. Of course, if the company has managed to get it finished in time, the Reality Pro headset will be the flagship announcement. But one of Apple’s lesser-heralded products may just be the sleeper hit of the show.
Last month, respected leaker analyst Mark Gurman claimed that watchOS 10 will be so good that no one will care about the (reportedly rather disappointing) new Apple Watch hardware coming later this year. What that means in practice seems to be an updated interface, and while using the word “updated” instead of “new” implies something less radical and alarming than, say, iOS 7, most experts think it’s still a will be a major rethink of the way we operate our smartwatches.
A few days later, a new leak even gave us an idea of what watchOS 10 will look like. Most fundamentally, the Grid View app’s famous layout, a visually baffling honeycomb of unlabeled icons that’s remained the same since 2015 (albeit accompanied by the alternate List View in 2017), will reportedly be ditched at in favor of more iOS-like uniform rows of larger icons that you scroll through vertically. This seems much more logical and user-friendly, and might even tempt some of us to abandon the list view, which has a lot of benefits, but doesn’t give you any way to put the most-used apps closer to the center.
(I should interject at this point to warn that this second leak came from @analyst941, aka “anonymous-AS” and, more recently, “that leaker who got caught by an Apple sting.” At this (at the moment, it’s unclear how many of 941’s flurry of leaks were accurate, and how much was targeted disinformation. But at least in this case, the sources of the hapless leak are confirmed elsewhere. The core is probably accurate.)
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Going off the grid
Apple’s longstanding loyalty to Grid View is hard to comprehend; it’s just not an efficient use of a small screen and requires both an excellent memory of icon artwork (which can change rather clumsily) and nimble fingers. Perhaps the company felt that this was a recognizable signature of the Apple Watch, just as the Home button and later the notch and Digital Island have served as visible badges for the iPhone. But this is not, like the other examples, a matter of making a virtue of necessity. The grid view is just bad design that could be easily improved… and hopefully it will.
However, the interface refresh may not stop with rearranging the icons. If @analyst941 is to be believed (and as I said, that’s not a given), Apple is about to add folders to the Apple Watch home screen for the first time. This seems like a less logical evolution, but that may be because I haven’t yet seen how watchOS will implement the feature. I’m mentally transplanting the folder system from iOS to the watch when it really should be rethought to avoid clumsiness. Apple’s interface design team has dropped a few balls since Jony Ive left, but I’m optimistic they’ll find the right way to create folders on the smallest screen.
Most importantly, you must be willing to take risks, try things, and change them if they don’t work. And this is where watchOS development has been most disappointing. Basically, in terms of the home screen and app layout, Apple was generally unwilling to make the changes. It’s especially disappointing in this case because the Apple Watch has changed a lot in the way both maker and customers look at it since Grid View was created in 2015. Apple accepted that it got other parts of the interface wrong; the side button used to display a list of contacts, until the makers realized a dock would be more useful. It shouldn’t have taken that long to realize that Grid View was also a swing and a miss.
We killed Grid View and we welcomed maps. But there’s (allegedly) another change coming to the Apple Watch interface this year, and that’s widgets.
At the end of April, Gurman returned to the topic of watchOS 10 and predicted it would focus on widgets rather than apps, in an implementation that sits somewhere between the old Glances that the Apple Watch removed in watchOS 3 and the widgets you now come across the iPhone and iPad. (By the way, this matches a forecast from @analyst941.) It also shares some features of the Smart Stack in iOS and iPadOS, a very handy feature that cycles through the widgets shown based on location and time of day and what the thinks it will be most useful to you.
I used to not really go for Glances and shed few tears when they disappeared. But plenty of others have sung their praises for me, and I’m willing to believe they can work in an updated form.
The key here is to think laterally about the way the Apple Watch works and the qualities and limitations that make it different from an iPhone or an iPad. It’s always with you, so it’s uniquely useful for quick checking, but it’s small, so it’s uniquely inconvenient for extended navigation. (For example, I hate poking around in the Maps app, but when you get directions to a saved location with one tap, the user experience sings.) There’s a sweet spot, richer than the complication and simpler than the app, where the Apple Watch can provide in-depth and relevant information without requiring you to interact with it too much, and the new watchOS widget can take up that space.
Of course, we won’t know if the watch widget, or the rest of the interface refresh, works properly until the watchOS 10 beta rolls out next month. Perhaps it will be like iOS 7: initial alarm followed by a slight aesthetic softening and final acceptance. Maybe it will be an instant hit, or an irreparable failure. But most importantly, Apple has finally accepted that the Apple Watch’s interface is malfunctioning and needs to be changed. The first step is acknowledging that you have a problem. Everything else flows from that.
