At WWDC25 we launched a new type of Lab event for the developer community - Group Labs. A Group Lab is a panel Q&A designed for a large audience of developers. Group Labs are a unique opportunity for the community to submit questions directly to a panel of Apple engineers and designers. Here are the highlights from the WWDC25 Group Lab for watchOS (part 1). 1. I'm really excited about the new design system on all platforms. Liquid Glass is super cool. What do developers need to keep in mind when building for watchOS 26? To adopt the new design system, start with updating your app for watchOS 10 – If you have done so, your app will be mostly ready for watchOS 26. For more information, see Design and build apps for WatchOS 10. You can then look into Liquid Glass specific APIs to fine tune your app. This topic is covered in Adopting Liquid Glass. If you have SwiftUI views using any custom style, make sure they are still legible and fit with the new design system. 2. Something that really stood out to me were updates to the Smart Stack, with the system prioritizing Widgets when they're most relevant. Tell me more about these new opportunities for apps. Workout apps that record workouts using HealthKit may be automatically suggested on the watch face and appear in the Smart Stack without adding a widget. Relevant widgets are a great way to present information related to a date, location, point-of-interest type, sleep schedule, or fitness condition in the Smart Stack when it is relevant. Relevant widgets don't need to display a empty state view when they are not relevant. They are only shown in the Smart Stack when relevant. The watchOS 26 Design ToolKit in the Apple Design Resources includes a set of templates that you can use to layout your widgets. 3. Is the Wrist Flick gesture available to developers in the same way as Double Tap is? The system uses Wrist Flick to dismiss notifications and incoming calls, silence timers and alarms, or return to the watch face. There is no separate API for the Wrist Flick gesture. Apps that are using XCUIAutomation to make sure their user interface behaves as intended can use the XCUIDeviceHandGesture.flick to automate tests that verify that their app responds appropriately to the Wrist Flick gesture. For apps using automated testing, the XCUIDeviceHandGesture.doubleTap can be also be used to automate testing of the app with the Double Tap gesture. See XCUIDevice.perform(handGesture:) 4. Can HRV measurements be triggered on demand via API in watchOS? Guidelines or processes for enabling energy-intensive biometric sampling on development devices for IRB-approved research? You don’t have direct control on the sampling rate in watchOS. You can use HealthKit (HKQuantityTypeIdentifierHeartRateVariabilitySDNN, to be specific) to query the HRV data, once the system has sampled and persisted the data to HealthKit. If that doesn’t help, we suggest that you file a feedback report with your concrete use case for us to investigate. Specific to IRB-approved research using Apple Watch or its companion iPhone, you might want to look at this FAQ and SensorKit to see if they can be of any help. 5. What is the best advice for someone who is new to making a watchOS app that’s been on iOS and iPadOS? You can start with exploring the system experience features on watchOS, such as notifications, controls, and widgets, and getting familiar with the system spaces, like Smart Stack, watch face, and control center. Knowing the watchOS app design principles and practices is important as well. Design and build apps for WatchOS 10 is a great resource for this topic. SwiftUI is an amazing across-platform framework, and you will use it to create your watchOS app. If you're already using it, great! Keep in mind some watch-only constraints. Comparing to iPhone or iPad, Apple Watch has a limited battery and smaller screen size, which significantly impacts how people use your app and how your app works. 6. Was there any extension this year to the 7 day limit on querying Apple Health data on the watch? There is no change on the limit this year. You can get this official limit at runtime using earliestPermittedSampleDate. There are some exceptions, and so don't be surprised if you see some data types are retained longer. The companion iPhone holds the full set of the health data. If you need to access the health data that has been purged from the Apple Watch, consider doing it with your iOS app, and then passing the result to your watchOS app.

At WWDC25 we launched a new type of Lab event for the developer community - Group Labs. A Group Lab is a panel Q&A designed for a large audience of developers. Group Labs are a unique opportunity for the community to submit questions directly to a panel of Apple engineers and designers. Here are the highlights from the WWDC25 Group Lab for watchOS (part 2). 7. For widget (complication) update budgets, is there an overall budget or are scheduled update separate from APNS updates? For context I have a complication that is updated on a fixed schedule (every 20 min), but there can be times of the day that are more "interesting" where pushes make sense. Like timeline updates, the system budgets WidgetKit push notifications and delivers them opportunistically. You can use WidgetKit push notification updates as an addition to timeline updates. For more information, see Updating widgets with WidgetKit push notifications. 8. It seems like the new Control Center widgets can be sourced from either the iPhone or directly on the Watch. Can we control whether a control appears in the watch list, or will it always be a combination of all controls from both sources? iPhone controls will be automatically available on the companion Apple Watch, even if they don’t have an associated watchOS app. When an iPhone control is tapped on the Apple Watch, the action is performed on the iPhone. Controls whose actions foreground the iOS app will not appear on Apple Watch. If a watchOS app has controls, no controls will appear on Apple Watch from the companion iOS app. 9. From UI/UX perspective, what are the current practices for Designing watchOS apps that feels native. The WWDC23 session Design and build apps for WatchOS 10 covers the details of watchOS design principles and how to apply them in your app using SwiftUI. A lot of SwiftUI APIs, such as NavigationSplitView, vertical tab view, list view, and etc, already implement the look and feel native to watchOS. 10. When adopting the new design system on watchOS, it seems like the main place we will use the glass effect is for our buttons in toolbar? Standard buttons in system apps seem to continue to use a flat appearance and full width. We leave the choice to you – You can use the new GlassButtonStyle API or .buttonStyle(.glass) to apply the liquid glass material to buttons. Learn when to use the Liquid Glass styles in Get to know the new design system. 11. Is there any way to gracefully migrate extensions when their bundleIDs have to change? e.g., converting a multi-target watch app to single-target, which drops the .watchkitextension from both the app and WidgetKit ext bundleIDs Updating a watchOS app to single-target is covered in TechNote TN3157: Updating your watchOS project for SwiftUI and WidgetKit. Xcode provides a tool that can do the update automatically, and the technote describes the details about how to use it and how to clean up the project after the automatic update. If there's something that technote doesn't address, please reach out to us on the Developer Forums. 12. What is the status of WatchConnectivity? Is that still the preferred way for iOS + watchOS communications? The Watch Connectivity framework is still supported, and is appropriate for the communication between an watchOS app and its companion iOS app. The systems also provide other APIs for the apps to exchange data. For example, watchOS supports Apple Push Notification service (APNs). If data for your widget changes on your server, your widget can receive a WidgetKit push notification, and update accordingly. That’s the preferred mechanism for widget updates.

Hi developers. I've been working on a Watch companion app for my product these past few days, and I'm currently trying to push it to TestFlight. I get stuck at the validation step with endless errors. The first one typically is missing WKApplication in Info.plist. That's fine, I'll add the field in Watch target > Info. Now more errors appear: Invalid UIDeviceFamily value of '1' and '2' Unsupported key UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities DTPlatformName value invalid Missing architecture, the bundle must contain arm64_32 because it's built with watchOS SDK 5+ I never set these values in the Info tab, so my guess is they're being overwritten by the Runner Build Settings, even though watch target build settings are correct (for example, Targeted Device Family is set to Apple Watch). What I've tried so far: Disabling auto generation of the Info.plist, and manually setting UIDeviceFamily to '4', but that doesn't help, unless I do it after creating the archive by editing the archive files and resending it to validation. I also tried a bunch of other post-build modifications to try and fix all the errors but new ones kept popping up. Cleaning Build Folder and DerivedData, restarting XCode, rebooting the computer... no effect, which is expected given that the building process doesn't return any errors Validating just the app without the apple watch (so from my main branch), still works as expected. Recreating a blank watchOS target and trying to validate just that, I get stuck in the same way. Project details: XCode Version 16.3 (16E140) Flutter 3.27.3 Targeting latest watchOS and iOS 16+ Do you have an idea what could be the problem here ? I'm sure it's just a missing or invalid property in some configuration file, but I can't figure it out and there are no resources online documenting the issue, and no "tutorials" on how to properly set up a watch target from Apple. Thank you for your time. A.H.

On Apple Watch, I have used toolbarForegroundStyle view modifier to change the color of the navigation title programmatically to offer theming support for users. In watchOS 26 it no longer seem to have any effect. For example with .toolbarForegroundStyle(.blue, for: .navigationBar) the title color still uses the AccentColor from the Assets catalog. Is there any other setup required to get this working, or is it a bug? Filed a feedback FB18527395

as a beta tester I am trying to explore the OS on multiple platforms like iO, iPadOS, MacOS, WatchOS. While on trying to use beta 1 have few issues and reported to Apple with analytics as I do for better improvements. But, in beta 2 there is an issue of glitches on UI. This also tried to report. But, while am trying record screen I can not see in that video after the screen record. But, in reality I can see that glitch with eyes. as everyone know without evidence we can not report the same with tickets properly and they also can not resolve the issues. It’s affecting on all types of OS platforms of Apple buttons and search positions etc. one more thing I absorbed is while am trying use overlay player and browse the safari or any apple developer apps which are full screen the devices are freezing and not responding and after hard restart those are starting after 10mins. As per my knowledge. Those are going through the memory overflow issue.

On my MacBook Pro M4 with macOS 15.5 and Xcode 16.4, I have a simple SwiftUI-based WatchOS application consisting of a NavigationSplitView that displays a short List of items, and a detail view consisting of a TabView {...}.tabViewStyle(.verticalPage) that displays a fixed number of "pages" of detailed information about the selected list item. When I use XCTest UI Automation with XCUIApplication(), I am finding that I need to add a sleep(1) after every interaction, such as a .tap() or .swipeUp() before I can attempt any assertion such as XCTAssertGreaterThan(app.cells.count, 3) to ensure that the top level List of items is more than 3. All the added sleep(1) statements are making the tests very slow... It appears that the WatchOS implementation of UI Automation lacks the ability to wait until the UI event queue is idle. Am I the only one seeing this?

How to launch companion Watch App without relying on Health Kit? I need my companion watch to launch automatically in some specific cases. What I'm doing to achieve that is to call "startWatchApp" in HKHealthStore(). This worked flawlessly for well over a year but AppReview is now giving me a hard time about using HealthKit without actually using health related data. Is there a way to do the same without using HealthKit? Seems silly that this is bundled only with the HealthKit... If I don't find another solution I will probably be forced to start reading heart rate data and reporting it to the user just so that AppReview will stop saying that I have no reason to use HealthKit... But ideally I'd love to learn about a way to open the companion Watch app without HealthKit and do things the right way...

Hi all, I'm developing a standalone SwiftUI watchOS app (no iOS host or extension), targeting watchOS 11.5, and running into persistent connection issues with Xcode. Xcode rarely detects my Apple Watch (Series 7, watchOS 11.5) Sometimes it appears nested under the iPhone; most of the time, it doesn’t Errors include: "OS version is lower than the deployment target" (both are 11.5) "Unable to install... device not supported" "Connection error 4000", "Tunnel timeout error 1001" "Ensure Wi-Fi is enabled on both machines" (Wi-Fi is on and on the same network) Once in a while, the app does install, but mostly I’m blocked. What I’ve Tried Verified pairing and trust Cleaned builds, nuked Derived Data and caches Reset iPhone privacy settings Removed and re-added my Apple ID Used xcrun xctrace list devices (watch inconsistently appears) Despite this, the app only installs about 5% of the time. Testing (or even running) on real hardware is nearly impossible, and has become incredibly frustrating for me. Any help or insights would be much appreciated.

Exercise caution applying Beta 2 on a Hermes Apple Watch. A number of anecdotes (including my own) that this causes very rapid battery drain, i.e. minutes, followed by a cycle of lower power mode, and very slow charge as battery drain seems as fast as charge so it tops out in low single digit %. Any interaction seems to cause the cycle to recur, rendering the watch in effect unusable. The connection to the phone is also broken, with the Watch app crashing after 1–2 seconds, 100% repeatably. This post is to caution avoidance, but a fix is going to be problematic if the watch can't get anywhere near 50% charge. The "anecdata" that this is widespread specifically with Hermes watches is: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/watchos-26-beta-thread.2458443/page-5?post=33976625#post-33976625 And: https://www.reddit.com/r/watchOSBeta/comments/1lipud8/comment/mzh6ekt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Emailed through developer.apple.com with case ID 102630146259. Submitted feedback FB18336070 & FB18323575.

Hi all, I’m trying to implement a collapsible section in a List on watchOS (watchOS 10+). The goal is to have a disclosure chevron that toggles a section open/closed with animation, similar to DisclosureGroup on iOS. Unfortunately, DisclosureGroup is not available on watchOS. 😢 On iOS, this works as expected using this Section init: Section("My Header", isExpanded: $isExpanded) { // content } That gives me a tappable header with a disclosure indicator and the animation built in, as expected. But on watchOS, this same init displays the header, but it’s not tappable, and no disclosure triangle appears. I’ve found that to get it working on watchOS, I need to use the other initializer: Section(isExpanded: $isExpanded) { // content } header: { Button(action: { isExpanded.toggle() }) { HStack { Title("My Header") Spacer() Image(systemName: isExpanded ? "chevron.down" : "chevron.right") } } That works, but feels like a workaround. Is this the intended approach for watchOS, or am I missing a more native way to do this? Any best practices or alternative recommendations appreciated. Thanks!

Hi. I'm hoping someone might be able to help us with an issue that's been affecting our standalone watchOS app for some time now. We've encountered consistent crashes on Apple Watch devices when the app enters the background while the device is offline (i.e., no Bluetooth and no Wi-Fi connection). Through extensive testing, we've isolated the problem to the use of NSPersistentCloudKitContainer. When we switch to NSPersistentContainer, the crashes no longer occur. Interestingly, this issue only affects our watchOS app. The same CloudKit-based persistence setup works reliably on our iOS and macOS apps, even when offline. This leads us to believe the issue may be specific to how NSPersistentCloudKitContainer behaves on watchOS when the device is disconnected from the network. We're targeting watchOS 10 and above. We're unsure if this is a misconfiguration on our end or a potential system-level issue, and we would greatly appreciate any insight or guidance.

This is probably a basic question but I wanted to ask your advice for the best way to take consenting users' Watch data from Apple Health Kit and send it to our central server? One idea we had was to create an iOS app that gets the data from Apple's Health SDK on the phone and sends it to our server. Would appreciate any help here, thank you.

Hi everyone, I'm building a health-focused iOS and watchOS app that uses WatchConnectivity to sync real-time heart rate and core body temperature data from iPhone to Apple Watch. While the HealthKit integration works correctly on the iPhone side, I'm facing persistent issues with WatchConnectivity — the data either doesn't arrive on the Watch, or session(_:didReceiveMessage:) never gets triggered. Here's the setup: On iPhone: Using WCSession.default.sendMessage(_:replyHandler:errorHandler:) to send real-time values every few seconds. On Apple Watch: Implemented WCSessionDelegate, and session(_:didReceiveMessage:) is supposed to update the UI. Both apps have WCSession.isSupported() checks, activate the session, and assign delegates correctly. The session state shows isPaired = true and isWatchAppInstalled = true. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are on, both devices are unlocked and nearby. Despite all this, the Watch never receives messages in real-time. Sometimes, data comes through in bulk much later or not at all. I've double-checked Info.plist configurations and made sure background modes include "Uses Bluetooth LE accessories" and "Background fetch" where appropriate. I would really appreciate guidance on: Best practices for reliable, low-latency message delivery with WatchConnectivity. Debugging steps or sample code to validate message transmission and reception. Any pitfalls related to UI updates from the delegate method. Happy to share further details. Thanks in advance!

I am experiencing an issue with my watchOS app. My application updates a shared file, accessible by both the main app and the WidgetKit extension, during a WatchConnectivity background task. Following this update, I call reloadAllTimelines(). This functionality worked as expected on watchOS 10, even without Developer Mode enabled. However, after updating my device to watchOS 11.5, this API appears to be broken. My reasons for believing this API is broken are threefold: The functionality worked reliably on watchOS 10. On watchOS 11.5, enabling "WidgetKit Developer Mode" (found under Settings > Developer) resolves the issue, and my complications update correctly. When I enter watch face edit mode, the snapshot/preview displayed (which utilizes the same underlying logic as the timeline API) shows the correct data. This indicates that the data has been successfully received from the phone, and the widget is indeed reading the updated shared file. Despite this, the actual widget view during its resting phase never updates. It's worth noting that TimelineReloadPolicy functions as expected, but I cannot rely on this for my use case. My widget requires immediate updates upon receiving new data. Apple, please investigate this behavior.

Hi Apple developer community. I have a question a lot of users don’t like the new control center and notification center. Are you guys gonna blur the background or are you guys gonna keep it the same?

Hi, as stated in the title I'm trying to launch a watchOS app from its companion iOS app. My issue is very similar to this post: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/734362 The response from apple in that post says that it is not possible, but I have found it to be possible for media apps. Specifically if you turn Settings > General > Auto-Launch > Live Activities > Media Apps and turn Auto-Launch to "App". My app is for medical research and having this available would be very helpful for our testing. I need the app to be fully in the foreground. Is there a way to get specific permissions for our app to do this? Am I missing something? I've tried starting a workout session to accomplish this, but it only seems to work when the watch is charging. Any feedback is appreciated, thank you.

I have an Apple Watch 4. (GPS). It's on version 10.6. I'm trying to deploy a basic app onto it (IOS 18) (WatchOS 9.6). I've set the targets in General for Watch App, Watch AppTest, Watch AppUITest. I still get an Apple Watches watchOS doesn't match App Watch app.app watch02 9.6 deployment target. Upgrade users Apple Watch watchOS version or lower app app.apps deployment target. What can I do to fix this?

The sequence of events when Fall Detection is triggered is not clear from the documentation. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/763738 This post assumes that when a fall is detected by the watch, the standard UI ("It looks like you've taken a hard fall...") is shown, and only after this is resolved (user taps an option or times out) is an event sent to the CMFallDetectionDelegate in our app - is that correct? Is it possible instead to have our delegate be notified of a fall event immediately, and let our app's UI present options for next steps to the user?

As a third-party application on Apple Watch, can it be located in the same LAN httpServer? Currently, when testing to initiate an http request in the LAN, the connection timeout is returned, code: -1001 self.customSession.request("http://10.15.48.191:9000/hello").response { response in switch response.result { case .success(let data): dlog("✅ 请求成功，收到数据：") if let html = String(data: data ?? Data(), encoding: .utf8) { dlog(html) } case .failure(let error): dlog("❌ 请求失败：\(error.localizedDescription)") } } 执行后报错 Task <B71BE820-FD0E-4880-A6DD-1F8F6EAF98B0>.<1> finished with error [-1001] Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1001 "请求超时。" UserInfo={_kCFStreamErrorCodeKey=-2102, _NSURLErrorFailingURLSessionTaskErrorKey=LocalDataTask <B71BE820-FD0E-4880-A6DD-1F8F6EAF98B0>.<1>, _NSURLErrorRelatedURLSessionTaskErrorKey=( "LocalDataTask <B71BE820-FD0E-4880-A6DD-1F8F6EAF98B0>.<1>", "LocalDataPDTask <B71BE820-FD0E-4880-A6DD-1F8F6EAF98B0>.<1>", "LocalDataTask <B71BE820-FD0E-4880-A6DD-1F8F6EAF98B0>.<1>" ), NSLocalizedDescription=请求超时。, _kCFStreamErrorDomainKey=4, NSErrorFailingURLStringKey=http://10.15.48.191:9000/hello, NSErrorFailingURLKey=http://10.15.48.191:9000/hello}

Hi, I’m currently developing a watchOS app and ran into an issue where I can’t enable Developer Mode on my Apple Watch. Device info: Apple Watch Series 9 (watchOS 10.4) Paired with iPhone 14 Pro (iOS 17.4.1) Xcode 15.3 (macOS 15.5, Apple Silicon) Issue: When I try to run the app on my physical watch device, Xcode prompts that Developer Mode needs to be enabled. However, there is no approval request on the Apple Watch, and no Developer Mode option appears under Settings → Privacy &amp; Security. I’ve already tried the following: Rebooting both devices Unpairing and re-pairing the watch Erasing and setting up the watch again Signing out and back into my Apple ID Using the latest Xcode version (15.3 and 16.3 both tested) Running clean builds and checking provisioning profiles Attempting install via both simulator and physical device Still no luck — the app will not launch on the Apple Watch due to Developer Mode being disabled, and the option is missing entirely from Settings. I visited an Apple Store Genius Bar, but they couldn’t help and told me to contact Developer Support. I’ve already submitted a support request, but in the meantime I wanted to ask here in case anyone else has experienced this and found a workaround. Thanks in advance.