watchOS 9: Pushing health and functionality to the experience

Last year when Apple announced watchOS 8, the feature set more or less a underwhelming update, with some new things here and there but nothing to knock your socks off. However, what should be expected for Apple's offerings this year with watchOS is quite interesting.

A new report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg a couple of days ago suggests an interesting new feature. He talks about a new "low power mode" function in the Control Center. It is said to allow users to run apps and features without using as much battery life. This could help make the Apple Watch more useful for users who want to use their watch with limited resources to preserve battery life, also possibly disable Always On as well. Currently, Power Reserve mode on Apple Watch only shows the digital time and nothing else.

More exciting news indicates Apple is also making updates to many of its watch faces we have currently. Some watch faces that we've had for years and years, since the original Apple Watch back in 2015, and as the Apple Watch has been having bigger and bigger screens, more new watch faces could be remastered in a way that would take advantage of it. It's sort of like the iPhone SE, keeping old times but making them new.

Gurman also says the Apple Watch will continue gain new workout types, track more metrics during a workout, and more system sleep tracking functionality details with watchOS 9. The way I think this would work out is eliminating the use of sleep apps, especially the ones that track snoring. This could be implemented as other companies like Fitbit have been tracking snoring. Gurman did not go into detail that much in the report so it leaves much room for interpreting it. I think that there could be trends included too, just like in the graphics down below.

Subsequently, the pill medication reminders app, a feature that Bloomberg has been going into detail about since 2019 is also coming as well. It could be implemented into the Reminders app on the Apple Watch. Yesterday's report also suggests that new women’s health features are expected, along with the number of health features like period cycle tracking. This includes many new updates, including a more detailed report on atrial fibrillation. We could also see a crash detection feature that we reported on months ago via the Wall Street Journal's paywalled article. It uses a number of sensors to detect sudden impact which could be useful when in a car crash.

In the meantime, on the more hardware side of the watch, third-party glucose sensors to the watch and the iPhone’s Health app are being discussed to being added. Bloomberg also talked about plans for Apple having teams working to add noninvasive blood sugar monitoring to the watch, a feature to help with diabetes. That feature is still many years away from doing that, but it's in the works. We've also heard last year about body-temperature sensors being added, so we could keep a lookout for that in this year's watchOS updates (in source code), but it seems like a hardware thing at the moment.

Apple is expected to announce watchOS 9 along with iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, and tvOS 16. The keynote will be held on June 6, as I reported on last week. The keynote will be all virtual, however there are opportunities for developers and students for small amounts of them to head to campus and watch the Keynote and the State of the Union address.