Here are all the top apps for your iPhone-compatible smartwatch with fitness, sleep and more included.
The Apple Watch is onto its third generation now, and the aptly-named Apple Watch 3 is proving pretty popular — so that’s why you’re probably here checking out the new apps.
In fact, it’s one of the best smartwatch options out there, and now we’re at the third generation it’s becoming a particularly accomplished smart option for your wrist.
Before you get into that though, remember to head into the Apple Watch main app on your iPhone — that’s where you’ll see a list of the apps already installed on your phone that can also be transferred to your Watch. If you see any you like the look of here, you’ll need to download them to your iPhone first.
Make sure you tag the apps you want on your watch — and disable the ones you don’t, as that will take up valuable space you can use to add music onto — especially great if you have the Apple Watch 3 LTE version, and an Apple Music subscription.
Apple is positioning the Apple Watch not just as a handy gadget but as something that can save your life, and the Apple Heart Study app is designed to do just that. It’s been created in collaboration with Stanford Medicine to monitor your heart rhythms and identify any irregularities, such as the potentially very serious condition AFib (atrial fibrillation).
AFib is a common cause of blood clots and heart failure, and it can also cause strokes. Despite affecting millions of people it’s often undetected because the symptoms aren’t obvious to us. They can be obvious to the heart rate sensor in our Apple Watches, though.
In practice, the Heart Study app tells you when it spots an irregular rhythm — it’s not the same as the heart rate monitor already in the watch, which tends to pop up unwanted warnings when we’re jumping around with the kids because we’re fantastically unfit.
The study app only tells you of things you need to know. Participation in the actual study is voluntary, but if you join you can receive a free video consultation about any detected irregularity.
However, the study is US only. If you’re outside the US, try the Cardiogram app instead, as it too monitors for irregularities.
Transit is mainly for American users, but its city coverage extends to more than 50 non-US cities including London and Paris too. It’s a public transport app, and it works on a simple and largely accurate assumption: when you use the app, you’re in a hurry.
That means instant information for departures on nearby routes and a Take Me Home button that tells you how to get home as quickly and simply as possible. In a single screen it offers directions, details of the station, the next three departures and the number of the service.
Public transport tends to bring out the best in designers — think the simple genius of the London Underground map or the colorful signage on the New York subway — and that’s definitely the case here.
Transit makes excellent use of color and typography to provide all the information you need in a very effective way.
It may only shave a few seconds off your travel time, but if you’ve ever harbored dark thoughts when someone at the gate in front of you is wasting time you’ll know that for commuters, every single second counts. If you spend a lot of time traveling, you’ll save a lot of time with Transit.
If there’s one thing the App Store isn’t short of, it’s note-taking apps. But it’s worth taking a look at OneNote, especially if you work across a range of Mac and PC devices, because as it syncs via Microsoft’s cloud, it’s a very good cross-platform app with particularly well-designed iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to organize pretty much everything.
We use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, random scribbled ideas in the wee small hours and anything else we think we might need to refer to later, and unlike some rival cross-platform services it’s completely free. Microsoft hopes you’ll like it so much you’ll embrace Office, which is available for a very low price as part of a premium OneDrive plan.
Microsoft has become rather good at keeping its Watch apps simple, and OneNote is no exception: tap the cross icon to dictate a new note, or tap a notebook or note to see its contents.
And that’s pretty much all it does — and that’s all it needs to do, because any watch screen is poorly suited to complex tasks. We’d much rather have speed and simplicity than any ill-conceived bells and whistles.
The Misfit app is designed to connect to the firm’s various wearable health monitors and third-party devices from the likes of Swarovski and Speedo, but it’s a useful Watch app in its own right too even if you don’t have any other wearable devices.
It can use your Watch’s sensors to track activity, but the USP here is its integrated workouts for people in a hurry. When it was first introduced it was called Misfit Minute, but it’s since been renamed to plain old Misfit.
Inside the app there are workouts designed to last 1,4 and 7 minutes respectively, covering strength training and cardio. One minute doesn’t sound particularly strenuous but you’ll be surprised: the app appears to be haunted by the ghost of a particularly sadistic circuit training coach, and you’ll definitely feel the seven-minute workout across your body.
The app also tries to motivate you during your workout — “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and that kind of thing — and it promises that no two workouts are alike, although realistically if you get bored during a one-minute workout you might need more motivation than any app can offer.
Using the app is simple. Choose the kind of food you want to time, such as a roast chicken or a steak, and tell the app how heavy it is and, where appropriate, how well done you want it to be. The timer lets you know when to flip or remove it from the heat.
It then tells you what to do, so for example in the case of your steak you’re urged to let it rest for five minutes and then slice across the grain. You’ll also see photos so you can compare what your food looks like with what it should look like.
It’s not the most comprehensive app around, but it isn’t supposed to be: it’s designed for relatively inexperienced cooks and the 40-odd items it does know about cover all the basics. If you’re unsure of cooking times or just easily distracted, it’s a great app to have.
Night Sky is one of those gee-whiz apps that you use to show off your iPhone, and the introduction of a complication to let you know if the International Space Station was overhead was cute in a geeky way.
But the arrival of watchOS 4 has given the developers plenty of new toys to play with, and that means Night Sky is now one of those gee-whiz apps you use to show off your Apple Watch.
With this version of the app, your Watch now gets the same Sky Tracking features as the iPhone app has: you can now raise your wrist and identify the stars, planets and constellations around you.
There’s a time travel feature too, so you can track how the various heavenly bodies will move. It’s enormously clever and very impressive, and the main iPhone app isn’t bad either, as its Sky View knows of 115,000 celestial objects and enables you to increase or decrease light pollution, explore animated 3D models and customize notifications.
If you sign up for the $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 monthly premium subscription you get access to worldwide sky tours that you can save for future use — for example if you’re planning to visit a particular location in the near future.
We know what you’re thinking: surely it should be W for Wikipedia? V was formerly known as Viki, but had to be renamed due to a trademark issue. No matter what it’s called, it’s a really useful Apple Watch app: it brings relevant Wikipedia content to wherever you are.
For example, you might want to know the history of a public landmark, or to discover what’s nearby. V presents the information in a clear and straightforward manner, it uses dictation and 3D Touch to good effect and it uses Handoff for longer entries that are better suited to your phone’s larger screen.
The developers have clearly thought about how people would actually use the app: you can call up V from a complication, use voice search to find a place, bookmark it with 3D touch and pick it up on the iPhone later. That simplicity means it’s an app you’ll actually use rather than one that’ll gather digital dust in your apps list.
It’s exceptional on the iPhone too, taking the rather dull design of Wikipedia and replacing it with something much more pleasing. No wonder it’s picked up awards including a Gold German Design Award and Apple’s App Store Best of 2016.
Your Apple Watch monitors your heart rate every five minutes, which is clever. But what do the numbers actually mean, and are they actually useful? Cardiogram wants to explain, and to do something important: help fight one of the most common kinds of heart arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation (AF).
Its Apple Watch app uses an algorithm that can identify the tell-tale signs of AF, something that’s treatable but that often goes undiagnosed.
Cardiogram isn’t just about detecting AF, as important as that is. It wants to make your health data useful, so it can tell you whether you’re sleeping properly (assuming you’re able to wear rather than charge your watch overnight), whether your resting heart rate is low enough, how well your heart recovers after exercise, and what makes your stress levels spike. It’s a workout tracker too.
The data the Watch app generates is best experienced on your iPhone, where the app provides crucial information and trends in the form of clear and colorful graphs. In the future it will know how to recognise more medical conditions too.
The potential is enormous: by combining (anonymous) data from thousands of Apple Watch owners, Cardiogram’s developers hope to use Big Data to help people live better, longer lives. How’s that for ambition?
This is a tale of two apps, depending on which version of Apple Watch you have. If yours is a first-generation model then it’s a useful but limited way to track your swimming stats: the first-gen watch shouldn’t be submerged, so you shouldn’t wear it while swimming.
However, if you have a second-generation Apple Watch (Apple calls it the Apple Watch Series 2) then you can take it into the pool — and that makes MySwimPro a much more useful application. You can log your workouts while you’re still in the water, and you can also follow the app’s workouts to set goals and monitor your heart rate during your swim.
Once you’ve dried off you can pick up the iPhone or iPad app, which syncs data from your Watch and enables you to see your progress in much more detail: miles swum, hours spent swimming, top times for specific distances and so on.
You can share your triumphs online, or you can just watch videos showing how other swimmers do particular types of workout. It’s probably overkill if you only do the odd couple of laps at the gym swimming pool, but if you’re serious about swimming it’s worth wearing on your wrist.
Proving that you should never underestimate our basic laziness, Just Eat created an app for people who couldn’t be bothered using the telephone to call for a takeaway. Now, it’s added an app for people who can’t be bothered reaching for their iPhone to open the Just Eat app.
One day historians may look back on this as one of the key steps in the downfall of western civilisation. Then again, easy pizza!
The Just Eat app is UK-only — if you’re in the US, try the Domino’s Apple Watch app instead — and it enables you to choose, order and pay for takeaways from the comfort of your wrist thanks to Apple Pay integration.
You can also choose to collect instead of having the meal delivered, but let’s be honest: if you can’t be bothered getting your phone you’re hardly going to want to go outside to collect your food — although if you’re driving it’s handy to order a pickup with a few taps.
The main iPhone/iPad app is much more attractive and informative, but when it comes to ordering regulars from your favorite local takeaways it doesn’t get much easier than having Just Eat on your wrist.
Sometimes the titles do all the work for us: yes, A Tiny Game of Pong puts a tiny game of Pong on your Apple Watch.
If you’re not familiar with Pong, perhaps because you aren’t really, really old, it was one of the first video games and was released in November 1972. The fact that it’s still playable — and quickly becomes frustratingly difficult — just demonstrates what a classic game it really is.
If you’re new to Pong, the gameplay is very simple: there are two paddles, one of which you control with the Digital Crown, and there’s a ball, which you try not to miss when the other paddle hits it towards you. The more times you don’t miss, the better your score. And that’s pretty much it.
There’s an in-app purchase that unlocks extra colors, which you can also unlock by posting about the game on social media, and there are high score tables that work via Game Center. But ultimately what you get is exactly what the title describes: a tiny game of Pong.
Dark Sky and CARROT Weather get all the reviews, but Yahoo’s weather app is a lovely thing on the Apple Watch.
It takes the same colorful, minimalist approach as the iPhone/iPad app, with screens showing trend lines for temperature, precipitation and wind speed, along with sunrise and sunset times and where the sun is right now, whether it’s going to rain and what the temperature highs and lows will be.
You don’t get the right-now weather warnings of Dark Sky or the sass of CARROT, just a clear, easy to understand and really well-presented set of predictions.
It’s not all sunshine and flowers, though. The host app is pretty big — 137MB, which is on the large side for a weather app, given that the UK Met Office app is 80MB and Dark Sky 20.8MB — and the accuracy of the weather forecasts seems to depend on where you live.
US users seem very happy with it, but UK users say it’s a little pessimistic: while it rains a lot in Britain, it doesn’t rain quite as often as Yahoo Weather says it will.
Then again, it’s better to warn of rain and be pleasantly surprised than to predict good weather when the skies are about to open.
Workflow is an absolutely fascinating app, recently acquired by Apple. If you’re familiar with OS X’s Automator it’s a bit like that but much more user-friendly and focused, and for iOS. And if you’re not, you’re going to like it a lot.
Workflow essentially turns your iPhone or iPad’s features into LEGO. You can take bricks from app X, combine them with bricks from app Y, and have a new toy to play with.
For example, you could create a workflow that takes your most recent photos and saves them to Dropbox, or a workflow that offers one-tap information on where the nearest coffee shop is, or that tweets the song you’re listening to. It’s absolutely brilliant and now it’s available on your Watch.
As you might expect, Workflow on the Watch doesn’t offer any creation tools: it’s purely a launcher in Watch form, allowing you to call up your workflows with a tap.
You might have a workflow to give you directions home from wherever you are, or to calculate a tip in a restaurant, or to read out your messages. It’s the kind of app you can’t imagine using, and then you use it and can’t imagine going without it.
There are lots of reasons to love Twitter, but there are lots of reasons to find it annoying too. Promoted tweets filling your timeline, people talking about subjects you couldn’t care less about, people retweeting people you couldn’t care less about, Piers Morgan… wouldn’t it be great if you could have a Twitter without all of those things? Don’t look to the official app for that any time soon. Go for Twitterrific instead.
Now in its fifth incarnation, Twitterrific on iOS is a superb Twitter tool. The Watch features require a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 in-app purchase to work fully, and they’re worth paying for: you can track your stats, be notified about direct messages, favorites, new followers and other action, use Handoff to start replies on your phone, compose tweets via dictation and block idiots instantly.
We’d recommend keeping notifications to an absolute minimum unless you only follow a few people — Twitter can be incredibly noisy when you follow and/or are followed by lots of people — but the Watch app is a great way of staying on top of Twitter while you’re out and about. It also reduces the risk of picking up your phone and thinking “while I’m here I’ll just check…” and losing hours to trivia.
If you deliver a lot of presentations tied to a computer or iPad you might watch Apple keynotes with envy. Wouldn’t it be great if you could stride around the room like that, surreptitiously tapping a button to move to the next slide instead of hovering over your hardware?
There are plenty of electronic clickers to do just that, but why get another bit of hardware you’ll probably lose when you can control Keynote from your Apple Watch?
Don’t expect speakers’ notes, views of upcoming slides or other presentation app goodies: the Watch app is designed simply to play presentations and move to the next slide when tapped. Everything else happens on devices more suited to editing: your phone, or your iPad.
And provided there’s decent Wi-Fi or you’re close enough to the presenting iPad or iPhone for Bluetooth it works really well. It’s surprisingly functional-looking for an Apple app — it isn’t remotely pretty, and looks like it was designed in a tea break — but then how much design do you really need when you’re using your Watch as a clicker?
Do you prefer Office to Apple’s apps? Microsoft has a PowerPoint app for the Watch right here.
You can’t get much more hipster than this: an Apple Watch app for the AeroPress coffee maker, enabling you to use a gadget costing hundreds of dollars to work out how to make a cup of coffee.
But while it’s easy to mock it’s actually a really useful and well-designed app, assuming of course you have an AeroPress. It’s the kind of thing that watch apps excel at: it does one thing, and it does that thing very well.
AeroPress Timer’s thing is to help you make the perfect cup of coffee. The app features coffee recipes from the 2014 AeroPress world championship, and takes you step by step through the process for each: how much coffee to use, when to stir, when to steep, and when it’s time to take a sip of your masterpiece.
It’s not just about fancy award competitors either: the app also includes the instructions you need to make standard recipes, two cup recipes and to improve your brewing prowess in general.
If you’re the kind of person whose eyeballs are vibrating with caffeine by lunchtime, you’re going to love the convenience of having everything you need to hand. Or rather, on your wrist.
Pennies was a recent Apple Editor’s Choice, for good reason: it’s a very simple and effective budgeting app that allows you to get on top of your spending without having to spend too much time doing so.
You can set weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, one-off and custom budgets, track in multiple currencies — great for holidays or business travel — and on the Watch, all you need to do is record how much you’ve spent against a particular budget, so for example if you have a shopping budget you’d tap it, tap Spend, and then enter the total.
The app then recalculates the amount you’ve got left, and if you wish you can have it displayed as a permanent Complication on the Watch face.
Pennies isn’t interested in what you’ve bought; just what budget it should be allocated to. As the developer puts it, “it’s all about keeping things easy and flexible so you can get on with having fun, spending what you want, and saving money at the end of the month.”
If like us you find personal finance a mix of tedium and terror, Pennies might be the app that helps you take control of your cash.
Is there anything more annoying than missing a delivery of something you’re really excited about? Yes: there’s missing a delivery of something that you really need to have in a hurry. Deliveries can help ensure that neither of those things happen to you.
It supports stacks of services including UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service, DHL, TNT, Canada Post, City Link and Royal Mail, can track packages, can add delivery dates to your calendar and can record past deliveries in case you need to refer to them later.
It’s unnecessary for the odd package, but it’s useful if you do a lot of online shopping or if you’re in the middle of a project, such as furnishing a flat.
On the Watch the app acts as a ready reminder of what’s in and what’s incoming, so for example it’ll show you if an item has just been delivered as well as the ETA of any other outstanding deliveries.
There’s a Complication too, which works particularly well on the Utility watch face and shows you the most recent delivery. If you have the macOS version of the app too you can automatically sync between Mac and mobile via iCloud or the developer’s own cloud sync service.
We’ve described the iPhone as the Very Hungry Caterpillar of tech, munching its way through entire product categories as stand-alone devices become iOS apps. We’re often delighted by the simplest things, and Clicker is one of those things.
It’s a replacement for those hand-held clickers people use to count things, and it’s appropriate for counting people, days, laps, drinks or anything else you might want to quantify.
To use it, just tap on the screen and tap again when you want another click. Haptic feedback means you don’t need to look at the watch, and you don’t need to have the clicker display all day: when you’re ready for a new click you can pull it up from its Complication. You can record up to 2,147,483,647 taps.
And that’s pretty much it: there are only two other options: subtract, to remove a mistaken click, and reset, to start again.
It’s hardly a must-have but it’s actually very handy, so for example we’ve seen users tracking how often they smoke during the day or how many glasses of water they’ve had. We wouldn’t recommend using it for counting sheep, though — or at least, not on the first-generation Apple Watch, whose battery isn’t really up to working nights.
We’re not convinced by the supposed science of brain training — it’s a sector that makes bold claims based on very flimsy evidence — but there’s no doubt that spending time learning or practicing useful things is better for you than mindlessly swiping through trivia on Twitter.
Elevate claims that its brain training app will “improve critical cognitive skills that are proven to boost productivity, earning power, and self-confidence”, and it does so by setting little tasks for you: choosing the correct meaning of words, calculating percentages and so on.
Correct answers earn points, and you can track your progress on the main iPhone/iPad app as well as on your Watch. The Watch’s small screen means the games you get are very simple ones, but that works well when you’re on the move.
The app is free and lets you play 4 mini-games. If you want to access the full selection of 40+ Elevate games you’ll need your iPhone or iPad and a subscription to the premium membership package, which is $4.99/£3.99/AU$7.99 per month or $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year.
If you could do with a boost to specific skills — working out restaurant tips, perhaps, or improving your vocabulary — then you might feel that’s well worth the money.
You may know CARROT from its weather app, which combines Dark Sky-style weather forecasting with sarcasm and lies. But CARROT wants to make you unhappy in many other ways — and what’s better for a sadistic AI than being in control of a fitness app?
Enter CARROT Fit, which takes a somewhat unusual approach to motivating you to get healthier and lose weight.
CARROT promises to “get you fit — or else”. To achieve that it offers a dozen punishing exercises (more are available via in-app purchases) accompanied by threats, ridicule, bribes and the occasional compliment.
It’s rude, crude and much more entertaining than trying to complete the rings on Apple’s own activity tracker, and we’re pretty sure it’s the only fitness app that rewards progress with cat facts. But there’s a proper fitness tracker in here too: it’ll track your steps and weight loss, remember your workouts and add data to Apple’s health app.
Most of the personality is in the main iPhone app, but the Watch alerts include such cheery prospects as “seven minutes in hell”. If you find getting fit or losing weight a little bit tedious, CARROT might be the, ahem, carrot that you need to get motivated.
Passwords are essential, but they’re also rubbish. The ones you can remember are easy to guess, the ones that are hard to guess are equally hard to remember, and if you do passwords properly it can be a pain to enter complicated strings of text and characters when you’re in a hurry.
Wouldn’t it be better if you could prove your identity to your Mac with your Watch? That’s exactly what Knock does.
Knock is a simple idea brilliantly executed. Provided your Mac is of relatively recent vintage — an Air from 2011 or better, a MacBook Pro or iMac from late 2012, a 2013 or later Mac Pro and so on — you can use Knock to automatically unlock your Mac or Macs by tapping the Apple Watch app.
It’s connecting via Bluetooth Low Energy — hence the reliance on relatively recent Macs; older ones don’t have Bluetooth LE — which uses tiny amounts of energy, so you don’t need to worry about the app killing your Watch’s battery any more than usual, and it works instantly if your Mac isn’t in sleep mode.
It may seem quite pricey for such a simple app, but think about how much time you spend locking and unlocking your Macs in a year.
Note that you may not need this if you have a recent Mac running macOS Sierra, as there’s a similar feature built in, but Knock is compatible with slightly older Macs too.
When we first got an Apple Watch we thought we’d use it for everything, but years later we’re still using Post-It notes when we go to the supermarket.
That’s mainly because list apps are often overkill for something as straightforward as a shopping list — so can the excellently-named and quite expensive Buy Me A Pie! app finally persuade us to leave the sticky notes at home?
User reviews certainly think so: it’s had nearly 3,000 ratings, averaging four and a half stars.
On the iPhone the app offers flat design and color coding, which by necessity has to be adapted for the Watch: the colored lozenges of the iPhone app are replaced with little colored lines beside items.
But the key feature here isn’t the appearance: it’s synchronization. Buy Me A Pie! syncs across all your iOS devices, so your partner could add an item to your shopping list on their iPad and have it automatically sync to your Watch along with a push notification.
It supports location-based reminders, stores multiple lists and has a learning function that automatically stores unfamiliar items in the app’s dictionary for future use. It’s very good at what it does, although it’s rather pricey if you only do the occasional big shop.
Mindfulness, the art of focusing on being present and aware in the world instead of being constantly distracted by things and thoughts that don’t matter, isn’t something you’d associate with the Apple Watch. If you aren’t careful with your notification settings your Watch pings away merrily all day, interrupting countless trains of thought.
But the Happier app hopes to use the Watch to make you feel better, not more harassed.
The app itself is free, but it’s designed as a gateway to paid-for mindfulness courses. If you don’t go for them you can still take advantage of the app, though. You can tell the app how you’re feeling — we suspect “meh” is the most-used option — and it then responds with uplifting quotes to help you feel a bit more optimistic.
It can pop up to remind you to take a meditation break, and you can dictate a positive thought to a private journal or to the Happier community. That’s not as daft as it sounds: there’s some evidence that keeping a journal of positive things can boost your mood over time.
Just be careful what and how you share: one iTunes reviewer says that they were able to locate their private journal with Google.
Readers of a certain age will remember Tamagotchi, the infuriatingly addictive electronic pets that took over the world in the late 1990s with their incessant demands for care and attention.
And now they’re back! Back! BACK! And this time, they’re on your wrist — which is fitting, because Tamagotchi is apparently a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and watch. If you’ve never used your watch to raise a virtual pet, here’s your chance.
This app is the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e Gen1, and it uses the Apple Watch in several ways: when your Tamagotchi wants your attention it’ll pop up on your wrist, you can monitor your Tamagotchi’s health, and you can carry out care actions — such as feeding it a meal or making it go to the toilet.
There are two modes to choose from: toy mode, which recreates the originals, and App Mode, which adds special colors. The app also enables you to put multiple Tamagotchi into a gallery, where you can then take pictures of them, and save said digital snaps to your Camera Roll.
It’s spectacularly pointless, of course, but it’s also pretty cute and faithful to the original toys — so it’s an app for rose-tinted spectacle wearers as well as for people who’ve never encountered Tamagotchi before.
As you’ve probably guessed, this app is a remote control for VLC. If you’re not familiar with those initials they belong to one of our very favorite apps, the VLC media player.
It’s a kind of Swiss Army Knife for playing or streaming music and video, and it’s available on iOS and on desktop computers too. We love it for many reasons: it’s fast, it’s free and it can read media formats most of us forgot ever existed.
The remote app solves a simple problem with computer media playback: if you’re on the sofa you probably aren’t anywhere near the computer that’s got all your media files on it.
It works with VLC on Mac, Linux or Windows, automatically finds any running copy of VLC on your local network and enables you to control the on-screen action with your phone.
The Watch app reduces that to bare bones: it gives you volume and transport controls, shows cover art and offers additional options — repeat, shuffle, audio on/off and subtitles on/off — via Force Touch.
If you’ve made VLC the heart of your home entertainment, this app should save you from wearing a path in the carpet between computer and couch.
Whether you’re a road warrior or an occasional holidayer, keeping track of the various aspects of your trip can be a pain. TripIt solves that by pulling all your travel-related documentation together.
All you need to do is send your travel confirmation emails — flights, hotels, car hire — to TripIt and the app will automatically organize them and tell you the information you need when you need it.
If you use Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo mail you can get TripIt to monitor your mailbox automatically, which makes things even easier. If you’re in the US, it even tells you when it’s time to head for the airport.
The phone app stores your itinerary and key documents, and the Watch app lets you know what’s important right now — so if you’re about to board a flight you’ll see the flight number and departure time, if you’re checking in you’ll see a booking reference and so on.
Things get really clever with the Pro subscription ($48.99/£38.99/AU$77.99), which adds live flight notifications, seat tracking and alternative flight finding should your plans change.
That’s probably unnecessary for most people, though: the free version of the app includes all the essentials you need for any kind of travel.
If your Watch strap is feeling a little more snug than it used to, this app may be the answer: it’s designed to help you achieve your weight loss goals “without the unsustainable gimmicks, fad diets, restrictive foods, on-site meetings, or large price tags of other weight-loss companies.”
It tracks the calories you’ve consumed and the goals you’ve set, focuses on nutrition as well as overall calorie intake, works happily with other fitness apps and trackers and provides an online peer group where everybody encourages each other to achieve their ideal weight.
It also enables you to set exercise goals and focus on general wellness, so it’s not just about losing weight.
The Apple Watch app doesn’t replace the phone app completely — for example, you’ll need your phone handy if you want to use the barcode scanner to automatically record what you’re eating, and the team-based features such as group challenges are phone-based — but it’s a great way to focus on your goals, monitor your progress and keep your motivation no matter how sorely tempted you may be.
The program is $39.99/£29.99/AU$62.99 per year but you can explore the app for free without signing up.
Microsoft earned well-deserved death stares from many Watch users when it bought and retired the excellent Sunrise Calendar iOS app, but its Outlook app is worth adding to your wrist.
It’s from the new, interesting Microsoft, not the staid bore of old: it works well, looks great and won’t crash your watch.
Outlook is a combined email and calendar app that connects to Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud, and its main claim to fame is the focused inbox: instead of showing you everything emailed, it shows the most important stuff only and learns by watching your swipes.
It’s particularly good in a corporate environment, where its talents cope admirably with endless meeting requests, time changes and backside-covering email traffic, enabling you to prioritize things that matter and forget about things that don’t.
That doesn’t mean it’s only for corporate types, though. Outlook is a really, really good email app and boasts a useful Complication that enables you to see what’s next on your schedule from the main Apple Watch display. If you have a busy life, a busy inbox or both it’s a very useful app to have on your arm.
Fitness fanatics look away now: for those that find exercise really boring, and their get up and go often gets up and goes while they stay sedentary.
