I’ve been using watchOS 26 for months. It’s not ready for your Apple Watch

Apple has pitched its upcoming watchOS 26 update as being infused with “even more intelligence” than its predecessors, and it claims you’ll find those smarts everywhere in the system, from small touches to full-on features powered by Apple Intelligence. But how true is that in everyday use?

To find out, I’ve been road-testing watchOS 26 since the first developer beta came out in June. In that time, I’ve ended up focusing on four new features: Workout Buddy, Smart Stack hints, the Liquid Glass redesign, and the new wrist flick gesture. Unfortunately, though, all four have left me feeling disappointed.

Ultimately, the main problem with each of these features is inconsistency. Some of them work half of the time but are frequently faulty. Others seem to be applied in a patchy way, appearing in one place  but not another.

If this is close to the finished product for each of these features—which is likely the case, given that Apple is on the seventh watchOS 26 beta now—it’ll feel like they’ve fallen well short of their potential.

Workout Buddy

I exercise a lot, so I was instantly intrigued by the idea of Workout Buddy. Having an AI-generated voice offer inspiration wasn’t exactly on my wishlist, but it piqued my interest enough to make it one of the first features I wanted to try out.

After some false starts (Workout Buddy didn’t work at all for the first couple watchOS 26 betas), I’ve been using it during my workouts for a few weeks. Yet even when it works, it’s still very hit and miss.

Typically, I do traditional strength training on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, then go for a walk or hike every other day. I also play soccer twice a week, although I don’t trust myself not to smash my Watch into smithereens during games, so I declined to test Workout Buddy during practice.

First, I enabled Workout Buddy and switched on alerts for heart rate and time. And with that, I was met with … silence. Workout Buddy didn’t give me a pre-workout pep talk, didn’t mark my heart rate or time milestones, and didn’t bring it home when the session was over – despite the fact that Apple says it’s compatible with traditional strength training workouts.

On to walking workouts, then. Here, Workout Buddy actually made its presence known, although perhaps a bit too much for my liking. Maybe it’s my reserved British nature, but having a hyper-enthusiastic AI trainer yelling in my ear isn’t quite my cup of tea. Hearing an absurdly pumped-up voice booming, “Your consistency is inspiring keep it up!” feels faintly ridiculous when all I’m doing is going on a leisurely morning stroll around the block.

Workout Buddy will interject on my walks with updates on my heart rate, pace, and distance covered, plus the occasional milestone. (“You’re on fire, you’ve just passed 7,000 minutes of walking this year!”) This is fine enough, but it doesn’t feel like the headline feature Apple made it out to be. All of this information is good, vaguely interesting even, but it’s not like it’s materially improving my technique or motivating me to push myself further. It’s just a semi-useful round-up that enjoys interrupting my morning podcast. With its lackluster presence during my walks and its total absence during weights sessions, it doesn’t exactly feel like an essential feature.

Smart Stack hints

As I mentioned in the last section, I have a fairly predictable workout schedule, with the same workouts happening on the same days most weeks. Given I know what I’ll be doing each morning, wouldn’t it be handy to be able to start a workout with just a couple of taps, instead of rummaging through watchOS menus?

That’s the idea behind the new, smarter Smart Stack in watchOS 26. Now, raise your wrist and it’ll suggest apps and features you might want to use at that given moment, like using Backtrack to guide you home, for instance. All you need to do is tap the suggestion, then hit the relevant widget, and it starts up instantly. These prompts are based on more data than before, such as your location, sensor information, and your daily routine.

It’s that last bit that got me excited for watchOS 26: if my Apple Watch can learn my routine, it might be able to suggest the correct workout on each day. That would make it much more of an assistant than a blunt instrument.

Unfortunately, that idea fell flat when it collided with reality. I’ve owned Apple Watches since the Series 5 and have had the same weekly workout routine for about the same time, yet watchOS 26’s Smart Stack hints are still irritatingly haphazard. Some days, I would see a prompt to start a traditional strength training workout at the correct time, right as I was about to actually begin. On other days, I’d get a walking workout prompt on a weights day, or vice versa. It’s like watchOS 26 knows I want to do some kind of workout, and it’s narrowed down roughly which ones, but it still doesn’t understand which one I do on each day.

Because of that, I still find myself having to manually open the Workouts app and start the correct session manually about half the time. I had high hopes for Smart Stack hints, but they’re clearly not quite there yet.

Liquid Glass

Liquid Glass was undoubtedly the headline announcement at WWDC 2025, with Apple bringing the visual overhaul to almost every one of its platforms. How does it fare on the Apple Watch?

Well, for the most part it’s a more understated implementation than you’ll find in macOS Tahoe and certainly in iOS 26. Many elements like the Home Screen and App Switcher look exactly as they did in watchOS 18. Other things, including the Smart Stack and Control Center, have more subtle glassy aspects, but nothing too overwhelming. If you don’t use a face that includes Liquid Glass text, you might not see much difference day-to-day.

Some of the few times I’ve really noticed Liquid Glass are when notifications pop up. There, alert boxes are translucent and let light through from apps and messages underneath them. In fact, notifications seem to be one of the rare places where Liquid Glass is really given the space to shine in watchOS 26.

So why is it not more prominent throughout the operating system? Only Apple can answer that, but the result is a pretty uneven implementation of Liquid Glass. In many instances, you won’t notice it at all. In others, it’s as obvious as it is on my iPhone. Why the inconsistency?

Wrist flick gesture

Any Apple Watch user will tell you that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by notifications. Dismissing them requires two hands, either to press the Digital Crown or cover the screen with your palm, so I was very interested to try out watchOS 26’s new wrist flick notification-dismissing gesture.

By tilting your wrist away from you in watchOS 26, you can dismiss a notification when your opposite hand is occupied. This action can also be used to mute incoming calls, silence timers and alarms, and close the Smart Stack. When it works, your Watch gently taps your wrist to let you know the alert has been dismissed.

That sounds good, but I’ve found it to be pretty fickle since I started testing it. Sometimes it’ll work perfectly, with a quick wrist flick clearing my Watch face and getting the notification out of the way. When that happens, it feels like a clever, useful addition to my wearable.

But the “when” in that last sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Like so many watchOS 26 features, this gesture feels frustratingly unreliable. In my experience, the flick gesture fails to clear my notifications roughly half the time I try it, forcing me into a longer interaction with two hands.

When it does work, it often needs a more vigorous, exaggerated motion than Apple demonstrated in its WWDC video. And even then, it feels like my Watch takes half a second too long to respond to the gesture, removing the notification slower than it should.

It means that the wrist flick gesture, while a good idea, comes across as pretty half-baked in its current incarnation. I’m hoping Apple tightens its execution here, as with the rest of watchOS 26.

Apple’s Awe Dropping event is set for September 9, 2025. Want to know what to expect? We’re anticipating new hardware releases including the iPhone 17 (running iOS 26), Apple Watch Series 11, Ultra 3 and SE 3rd-gen (running watchOS 26), and potentially new AirPods. Find out how, when, and where to watch the Apple September Event, and keep tuned to our Event Guide for all the latest coverage. If you just can’t wait, here’s our satirical take on the Apple September Event keynote script – and don’t miss the Macworld Podcast iPhone event preview.