Widgets will be a central element of watchOS 10. watchOS 10 – an operating system that Apple will preview for developers at WWDC23 in June – will integrate a new widget system for interacting with the Apple Watch.
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This was reported by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg in the latest issue of his newsletter “Power On”, explaining that the widgets will be central elements of the watchOS 10 interface. The rumor is not new and the indiscretion had already been reported by others at the beginning April. The Bloomberg editor compares the new system to Glances, the summary views of the most sought-after information present on the first Apple Watches, subsequently eliminated with new versions of the system, and with the widgets that arrived on the iPhone from iOS 14 onwards.
Also according to Gurman, the new watchOS interface will be reminiscent of the Siri watch face that arrived with watchOS, with an overlay in all other watch faces. The system would also remember the space-saving collections of widgets on the Home screen and Today View, with pre-built stacks of widgets showing the right widget based on factors such as time, location and what the user is doing .
“The idea is to allow the user to swipe between a series of widgets, for activity tracking, weather, stock tickers, calendar appointments and others, rather than apps to launch,” writes Gurman.
Apple is also testing functionality for the Apple Watch buttons; for example, pressing the Digital Crown could allow you to start a new widget view instead of calling up the function to navigate the home screen.
According to Gurman, these changes are a bit of an admission that the experience with being able to call iPhone-style apps doesn’t always make sense on the Apple Watch, something that hasn’t caught on. The new widget system is supposed to be an alternative mechanism to the traditional method of calling apps from the Apple Watch.