Matt Birchler’s Review of WatchOS 5 ⇥ birchtree.me

I don’t think anyone does WatchOS reviews as well as Matt Birchler, and this year’s is no exception. I’ve been running the beta all summer, because I am a demonstrably stupid person, and I learned a few of the more hidden updates to WatchOS in Birchler’s review. For example, the Siri watch face now supports automatic sports alerts:

This is kind of a weird one, but I’m happy to see cards about my favorite sports teams appear on the Siri watch face. It’s weird because your favorite teams are set up in the…TV app. You’d think this might be in the main settings app or something, but yeah, any teams you have set as favorites in the TV app will show on your Siri watch face when they have games going on.

So, to recap: Apple’s house-brand TV shows are available in Apple Music, and Apple Watch alerts for sports are set up in the TV app on your iPhone.

My favourite new feature in WatchOS 5 is probably automatic workout detection. Birchler:

Usually it just takes a few minutes of working out for it to notice that you’re doing something and present the notification. The good news is that it gives you credit for the entire workout, not just from when you confirm you are indeed working out. So when it asks you 5 minutes into a run if you are indeed in a workout, you get credit for the time, distance, and calories burned for those 5 minutes. It’s pretty slick.

The sensitivity of workout detection has been fine-tuned throughout different builds and I think Apple hit a sweet spot by the time WatchOS 5 shipped. Every so often, it doesn’t detect my twenty minute walk to or from work until I’m about halfway, but it doesn’t matter because it typically gives me credit for most of that journey. However, I’ve found it’s not always terrifically accurate at figuring out what kind of workout I’m doing: instead of an outdoor walk, it often thinks I’m running and, a couple of days ago, it thought I was using an elliptical machine.

Updating an Apple Watch is still a gigantic pain in the ass — though the overnight update mechanism, new in WatchOS 5, does help with that — but it’s totally worth it for this version of the software. If you haven’t updated yet, I strongly suggest you do. Apple is honing in on what the Watch is good at, and making it truly excel in those areas.