I've been wearing an Apple Watch for the past 4 years, but it's the one Apple product where
I've never really stopped to think about the hidden features, tips, and tricks that are
available for it. The Watch on your wrist can do a lot more than just tell the time,
and in this video I’m going to share 20 tips and tricks for your Apple Watch with you.
OK, let’s get into it.
A feature that was introduced in iOS 17 is the ability to leave someone a video
voicemail if they're not available to take your FaceTime call. A cool
feature on the watch is the ability to view those videos on your watch.
So, if you know that someone has left you a video voicemail, go to the app list on your watch and
choose the Phone app. Scroll down and select Voicemail. Any video voicemails that have been
left for you will be visible here, and you can simply tap on one to play it like a regular video.
There are some people out there who like to set their watch fast,
maybe by five or 10 minutes, so that the time they are working to is a little
earlier than the actual time. I guess if you're someone who's perpetually late,
this might make sense, and there is a way that you can do this on your Apple Watch.
On your watch, open Settings and choose Clock. The first option at the top of the
page should say "+0 min". Tap into it and use the digital crown to set your clock
face fast by up to one hour. Note that the only thing this will impact on your
watch is the time on the watch face itself. Everything else will run off the actual time.
If you receive a call on your Apple Watch, you can tap the green button to answer it and use
the watch to take the call. I've had entire phone calls while I've been out where I've
used the speaker and microphone in the watch for the entire call. There may be situations
where you don't want to do this and would prefer instead to quickly find your phone and answer it
there. The problem with this is that by the time you get to your phone, the person may
have hung up. So instead of pressing the green button, tap the ellipsis button next to it and
choose "Answer Call on iPhone". Doing this answers the call but puts the caller on hold
while you go and find your phone. You can tap to resume the call on your iPhone when you find it.
If you go to the Control Centre and tap the iPhone icon, it will ping your iPhone, making it play a
sound that you can then follow to go and find it. But did you know that if you tap and hold
on that icon, it will not only make your iPhone play a sound but also flash the camera flash?
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If you start a workout on your Apple Watch, it will begin with a 3-second
countdown. If you're doing some kind of sprint training, you probably want the countdown,
but if you're doing anything else, especially something like just going for a walk, it’s a waste
of time. Simply tap the middle of your watch while the countdown is happening to skip it.
You can log medication as you're taking it using your Watch, saving you from ever having to do the
whole "did I take my meds this morning” thing ever again. To do this, you first need to go to
the Health app on your iPhone, tap the browse button in the bottom right corner, and choose
medication. In here, you'll need to follow the steps to add a medication to your Health app.
But once you've done this, you can go to the app list on your watch and choose medication. Your
medication will be listed here - tap on the one that you'd like to log, then tap the log button.
Find My works really well across all of your Apple devices, but the one device where I think
it adds the most value is your Apple Watch. Your watch is attached to your wrist all the time,
so chances are, it's the item that you're less likely to lose. As long as you have
Find My enabled on all your devices, you can go to the app menu and choose
"Find Devices". If I tap on my iPhone, for example, I can see its location on a map,
check its current charge state, and if I scroll down, I can send a request for the iPhone to play
a sound to help me locate it. I can also tap on "Directions" to get directions to its location.
If you scroll down, you can also toggle on "Lost Mode". This will immediately lock the
device and display contact information on the screen so that if someone finds it,
they can use that information to return it to you.
Also, if you go back to the app menu, you’ve also got Find Items which is for use with your AirTags,
and you’ve got Find People, which can help you locate anyone sharing this information with you.
Your watch has a Water Lock mode, which is designed for when you go swimming. So
if you know that you're about to jump into a pool, tap on Control Centre and tap the water
icon. Your watch will enter water mode. During this time, the screen becomes less responsive,
meaning you're less likely to tap it by accident while you're underwater,
and it will also stop things like the excessive noise warning from
happening because this triggers all the time underwater if you don't enable this mode first.
When you get out of the water, simply tap the side button to open Control Centre,
and your watch should automatically recognise that you want to disable water lock mode.
Tap and hold the digital crown for just a moment to eject any water from your watch.
One of the biggest frustrations of the watch, in my opinion, is how difficult
it is to access an app. There’s no home screen, so you can't select apps using that method. One
option is to add complications for the apps you frequently use, but there’s a limit to
the number of complications you can have, and I'm not sure how practical this actually is.
In my opinion, the easiest way to solve this issue is to tap and hold on the digital crown
to activate your voice assistant and then say the name of the app you want to open. For example,
you can say "messages" and your watch will open the Messages app.
Or you could say "settings" to open the settings menu, or even say "accessibility"
to not only open settings but also navigate to the accessibility page within settings.
This tip is kind of controversial because it's actually referencing a feature that was
removed in watchOS 10, which many people really liked. Before watchOS 10, if you double-tapped
the digital crown, it would switch you between two open apps. Unfortunately, that feature is
no longer available. However, in its place is the ability to open the app carousel. This is the same
as the app carousel on your iPhone, where you can scroll between open apps and tap on one to quickly
jump back into it. The only difference is that if you want to force quit an app here, instead
of swiping up like you would on your iPhone, you swipe from right to left and tap the red cross.
If you find viewing the content on your watch difficult, there is a zoom option. On your watch,
open settings and choose accessibility. Tap on "Zoom" to toggle this option on.
With zoom enabled, use two fingers to double tap on your watch face to zoom in. Use the same
two fingers to move around on the watch face, similar to using a trackpad. Double tap with
two fingers to zoom back out. You can adjust the level of zoom by double tapping and keeping your
fingers pressed down on the second tap, then swipe up or down to change the zoom level.
The best camera on your iPhone is the one on the back of your iPhone; it's always going
to be better quality than the selfie camera. The problem, of course, is that if you want
to take a selfie, you need to be able to see the screen to know what you're taking a picture of.
Your watch has a function called "camera remote" that you can access by going into the app menu and
choosing it there. This will show you a preview on your watch of what your camera is seeing.
If you tap the ellipsis menu, you can choose from the front or rear camera. You can also
choose whether or not to enable a flash and whether or not to have a live photo.
At the top of this page, you have the option of enabling or disabling
a 3-second countdown timer. I would recommend enabling this because it
gives you the opportunity to set up and preview the image using your watch and
then a couple of seconds to compose yourself and look at the camera.
A follow on from the previous tip, if you tap and hold on the shutter button,
you'll begin recording a video. You can even switch through the different
lens options available by using the digital crown to zoom in and out.
Using either the dictation or the on-screen keyboard, you can reply to messages using your
watch. But you might find it easier to use the default replies instead. The good thing about
these is that you just tap on one to select and send it. The bad thing about them is that they’re
pretty generic. So it’s worth taking a couple of moments to set up your own default replies.
Open the watch app on your iPhone and scroll down to messages. Here,
tap on default replies. You can enable or disable smart replies if you wish. This is where your
watch will try to intelligently figure out the kind of reply you would like to send. Regardless,
I would recommend that you choose "add reply" and type in your own response. Anything you
add here will then be available the next time you receive a message on your watch.
If your watch supports the keyboard, which I believe is a Watch Series 7 or newer or any
Watch Ultra model, you can use the digital crown to move the cursor through text while
you're writing. It's really easy to do and makes it much easier to correct mistakes.
The Maps app on your watch is extremely useful, especially if you're somewhere
unfamiliar. The problem can sometimes be that your connected iPhone doesn't have data reception,
which means that Maps won't load. One way to fix this is to download
a map for an area that you plan on visiting ahead of time. To do this,
your iPhone will need to be updated to at least iOS 17. Open the Maps app and tap on your Apple
ID. Tap on offline maps and choose "Download New Map". Input a location and use the guides
to select the area you would like to download. Tap the download button when you're ready.
The map will be downloaded to your iPhone, and as long as you have your iPhone with you,
your watch will be able to access that downloaded data, so if you like to go walking in places where
there’s not much signal, this is a game-changer. Sidenote: this also works on Apple CarPlay.
The app list on your watch is kind of a mess, regardless of whether you use the list or
grid view. Part of the reason for this is that there are loads of apps that you're probably not
using. With this in mind, I would recommend getting rid of anything that you don't use.
Open the Watch app on your iPhone and scroll down until you reach the section called "Installed on
Apple Watch". These are all versions of apps that have been automatically installed on your
watch. For anything that you don't want, tap on the app and toggle off "Show App on Apple
Watch". This will remove the app from your watch but won't impact the app on your iPhone.
If you change your mind and want to install something, scroll down to the bottom of the list,
and you'll see a section called "Available Apps". This represents
any apps that aren't currently installed on your watch but are installed on your iPhone
and have a compatible watch app. Simply tap "Install" to install the app on your watch.
One of the most misunderstood features of the Apple ecosystem, in my opinion, is focus modes.
This is where you can have different modes set up for what you're doing - a personal focus mode,
work focus mode, driving focus mode, or pretty much anything you like. When in a focus mode,
your devices will operate and look slightly different. For example,
you could set a work focus mode where your iPhone has a completely different home screen
compared to your personal focus mode, where you remove apps like Instagram or TikTok.
But, did you know that you can also apply this to an Apple Watch face? On your iPhone, open Settings
and choose Focus. For this example, I'm going to tap into my work focus. You can see a section here
called "Customise Screens". The first two options are for choosing a custom screen for your iPhone,
both lock screen and home screen. But the third option is for your watch. Tap "Choose", and then
select the watch face that you would like to apply to this particular focus mode. Note that if you
don't have options here, you may have to go into the watch app and create some new watch faces.
Now, with the watch face selected, if I go to Control Centre on my watch and change my
focus mode from personal to work, you can see that my watch face changes as
well. I'll change it back to personal and the watch face goes back to how it was.
You can get super creative with this and have different watch
faces for all of the different things that you do.
I talk about shortcuts here on the channel all the time because I think it's one of the best
features of the iPhone. I've already made a couple of videos about Shortcuts, which I
will link to in the description of this video. But shortcuts, combined with the Apple Watch,
can be really powerful. A shortcut is basically a command to do pretty much anything that your
phone can do. Let's say that I've created a shortcut to both turn on all the lights
in the downstairs of our house and also set our robot vacuum cleaner to clean the floors.
I can't show you the process of creating that particular shortcut in this video, you'll need
to watch some of my shortcut videos to get a feel for how to create them yourself. But the beauty of
shortcuts on your watch is that once created, you can assign the shortcut to your watch.
On any Apple Watch, you can go to the Watch app on your iPhone,
tap on your watch face, and scroll down to complications. For any of the complications,
you can go to Shortcuts and choose your shortcut from the list there.
If you have an Apple Watch Ultra, you can even assign a shortcut to
the action button. Open the Watch app on your iPhone and choose the action button. In here,
tap where it says "Action" and choose "Shortcut". Scroll back up the page and tap where it says
"Shortcut". Choose your shortcut from the list to assign it to the action button.
Your watch can tell you the time instead of you having to look at it. To enable this,
open settings on your watch and choose clock. Scroll down and ensure that "speak
time" is enabled. If you choose "control with silent mode," this function won't work if you
have your watch silenced. For this, you would need to choose "always speak." Then,
at any time, use two fingers to tap and hold on the clock of your
watch face for just a moment. Your watch will speak the time to you.
It does this using your Siri voice of choice, but give it a try if you use the
Mickey or Minnie Mouse watch faces, you might be pleasantly surprised.
So there you go, 20 tips and tricks for the Apple Watch. What do you think,
anything that I should have included in this list? Drop me a comment and let me know.
Oh and remember, if you’d like to pick up your own Hoverpen, you can do so via
the link in the video description, and use code PHT for a 10% discount.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.