Vratislav Holub Only a weekend separates us from the introduction of new operating systems, which we will see on Monday, June 7, specifically on the occasion of the start of the developer conference WWDC21. One of them will also be watchOS 8. Since I have owned an Apple Watch for some time now, I can say what I really miss in the current system. Specifically, these are the 5 features I want from watchOS 8.
This is how Apple presented watchOS 20 at WWDC7:
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Better sleep monitoring
With the arrival of the watchOS 7 operating system, we received the long-awaited function for native sleep monitoring. At first I was extremely excited about this discovery. But that enthusiasm gradually decreased, for a quite simple reason - the sleep analysis is below average in my opinion. The watch can measure how much time we spend in bed, how long we sleep and then analyze how we are doing with sleep over the past few days. This is undoubtedly good data and it is useful to have an overview of it. But when I look at what it offers competing applications, which use the same hardware for the same purpose, I'm quite disappointed.
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That is exactly why I would expect a significant improvement in monitoring and subsequent sleep analysis from watchOS 8. Specifically, I would like the watch to be able to tell me how much time I spent in REM or deep sleep. If this was enriched with possible tips and tricks, a collection with soothing recordings/stories and a number of other little things, I would be extremely satisfied.
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Amaya Toman Breathing app redesign
Did you even know that the Apple Watch offers a native Breathing app? I'm not even slow. I played with it for about two days after buying the watch and haven't turned it on since. In my opinion, this is a quite interesting tool, but it could offer much more. In this direction, Apple could take action and remake the application in the form of a tool, with the help of which we could take care of our mental health. Such a program would come in handy especially during the pandemic, when we were constantly locked at home and greatly depressed by the whole situation.
The arrival of Notes
What I'm missing from the Apple Watch so far is the Notes app. I write down almost everything through this native tool, and somehow I don't understand why I don't have access to individual notes on the Apple Watch. I would definitely welcome the option if I couldn't make notes through the watch, but at least I could look at them at any time.
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Adam Kos A minute or several timers at the same time
The Minutka native application can take care of creating a timer and inform us about it after its countdown. It works almost exactly the same as on the iPhone. Here I would like to make one minor change - I would allow it to be possible to have several timers active at the same time. This can come in handy for several reasons, and I can personally imagine that I would use this option, for example, when cooking, or in moments when I would do several things at once. I would also welcome the same option in iOS/iPadOS 15.
Reliability
As I mentioned in my article about what I would like to see in macOS 12, so I have to mention exactly the same thing here. Above all, I would like watchOS 8 to be a flawless operating system, in which one error after another will not be waiting for me. I have to admit that the current version works quite well for me, but there is one rather annoying shortcoming that bothers me so far. In some moments, when I receive a notification that a friend has completed an exercise, completed a challenge or completed circles, my watch restarts by itself. It doesn't happen often, but I still stand by the fact that a watch at this price should never encounter something like this.
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I would like to be able to speak Czech on the watch. Sleep monitoring is the most useless thing in the world. I don't understand why everyone is promoting it like this. If it tells me that if I don't drink another coffee, that I will again sleep as badly as last night, then it will be of no use. But until then, apple should invest time in more essential functions.
And with soothing suppositories, your partner would most likely send you somewhere. Have a nice day.
And above all, other watches and their applications only "guess" what phase of sleep we may be in, how can they tell if they cannot detect eye movements (REM - Rapid eye movement) or brain waves? They only guess it from our movement in bed, so they only know farts. That's not to say that they couldn't give more statistics about sleep, maybe at least the movement in bed, so I could see when I was tossing and turning.