watchOS 9 - 25+ Best New Features & Changes!

Apple Watch Mirroring: A New Accessibility Option

One of the exciting new features in WatchOS 9 Beta 1 is Apple Watch mirroring. To access this feature, go to the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, tap on "General" and then select "Watch App". You will see a section called "Mirror" - if you tap on that, it will pull up an emulation of your Apple Watch screen. Although it doesn't actually show the screen, when you're wearing your Apple Watch, you'll notice a little red outline around it to indicate that you're mirroring from or to your iPhone. With this feature, you can essentially emulate what you'd be doing on your Apple Watch, complete with swipe gestures and control center functionality.

For example, if you want to see what happens when you swipe up, the Control Center will appear, or if you swipe down, the Notification Center will show up. You can also use the Digital Crown to navigate through different screens. If you press the side button, it takes you into your App Switcher view. This means that with Apple Watch mirroring, you can do everything you normally would on your watch from your iPhone - it's a really cool accessibility option.

Another Accessibility Feature: Quick Actions

In addition to Apple Watch mirroring, another exciting new feature in WatchOS 9 Beta 1 is Quick Actions. To access this feature, go into the iPhone's Watch app, select "Accessibility", and then down to "Quick Actions". From there, you can turn on Quick Actions for either full or minimal appearance. This means that you can customize hand gestures to perform specific actions on your Apple Watch. For example, if you want to double-clinch your wrist to activate a particular action, you can do so.

To use Quick Actions, you'll need to have Assistive Touch enabled on your iPhone. To enable this feature, go into the Settings app and select "Accessibility", then down to "Assistive Touch". Once you've turned on Quick Actions, you can customize the hand gestures to suit your needs. For example, if you want to use a double-clinch to activate an action, simply pinch and clinch your wrist twice - it's that simple.

A Slightly Redesigned Siri

One of the smaller but notable changes in WatchOS 9 Beta 1 is the updated look of Siri on your Apple Watch. When you invoke Siri, you'll notice a more iPhone-like interface. Instead of a traditional Siri bubble, you now have a sleeker and more modern design that looks great on both the iPhone and Apple Watch.

In addition to the redesigned Siri interface, there's also a new feature that makes it easier for users with low battery levels to know when their Apple Watch needs charging. If your Apple Watch is below 10% battery level and you put it on a charger, the entire Nightstand interface will turn red - this helps ensure that you'll always be aware of your Apple Watch's battery status.

Water-Resistant Controls

If you're an avid swimmer or plan to use water resistance frequently, there's also a new feature in WatchOS 9 Beta 1 that makes it easier to control your Apple Watch. When you go into the Control Center and enter Water Lock mode (accessible by tapping on the "Water Lock" option), instead of scrolling endlessly with the Digital Crown, you can now press and hold it to activate the action.

This change is a nice convenience for users who frequently use Water Lock mode - no longer will they have to constantly scroll through options with their Apple Watch on. It's just one small but welcome change that makes using your Apple Watch more intuitive and user-friendly.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys my name is brandon and watchos9 beta1 is here and after using it for a few days i wanted to share over 25 of my favorite features so far now i will be covering every single little change when the official version rolls out later this year but for now here's what's new in watchos 9. and i do have to mention before we get started that this software is only compatible with the apple watch series 4 and later so no more series 3 supports all right so first things first we have five new watch faces and watch os 9. so if we go ahead and haptic press right here if we go all the way over to press on the plus for new you can see you get a new little section here that shows you all of the new watch faces but i already added all of them so i will show you those right here so the first one is called astronomy so this is very similar to what we have on ios 16. you can see the time kind of goes behind the earth right there the globe which is pretty awesome if we have to press down right here we go to edit you can see we could change the font on at the watch face we have three different options to choose from there i think the modern looks the best personally if we go ahead over we have our views you have the earth you have the moon and then you have the solar system and then you can also set it up to do a random view as well and we have two styles here so we have random and we have a fool that shows the full earth and then lastly we have our complications section where we have two separate sections for complications now the next one is called lunar so you can see that's what it looks like right there it shows a different calendars so we have the chinese calendar hebrew islamic and those are the three that we have right there for the lunar cycle we also have our analog time or digital times you could choose which one you would like and then of course we can also change the colors right here so i'll do mine to like a blue color and then we have our four complications one in each corner and there's a nice view of what that one looks like with the blue color added in there now the next one we have is called metropolitan so this is my personal favorite of the new ones you can see it looks very nice it has kind of a old school look to it so if you go ahead to our edit right here you can of course choose the color and you can see a lot of that color with this watch face we go over to our complications we have one in each of the four corners and that's pretty much it but i think it's cool i think it's a very classic look of the watch face and i'm a fan of that one then we do also have a modular so we can change some things with modular we can change the colors now so this watch face obviously is not new but now we can change between all of these different colors here for the modular watch face we also have play time so you can see this is more of a kids oriented watch face you can see we have these little characters here that show the time and they kind of move when you touch on them if we go to edit you could change the color of the background of the watch face you could also change the background to be either on or off if you don't want that little confetti there you could turn that off if you would like to and there are no complications for this one and then finally we have portraits now portraits is not new but we can now do it with animals as well so animals can be detected as portraits not just people also in watchos 9 we have a new notification style so if we're using our watch like if we're actively using our watch you will see we have a new notification banner that comes up top and these notifications no longer take up the entire screen like they did before so you can see my little mail notification right there we also now have a dock in the notification center so if you have an app running in the background it will now get pinned and it will show up down here on the dock for easy access now if we head back to our watch face and go into our control center another little small change that i really like is the fact that the battery percentage is now blue so i find it to be much easier on the eyes especially at night it's a really small thing but something i did notice also down here we now have the text size control center toggle so when we tap on that not only do we have this toggle but we now also get nine different text size options in watchos 9 whereas before in watch os 8 we only had six options for text sizes we also have a lot of changes to workouts so apple put a big emphasis on workouts and health features of course that's one of the biggest benefits of an apple watch so now on a workout screen you get a lot more information so you have your activity rings you have heart rate zones you have power and elevation if you're hiking or biking and you're you know you're going upstairs you get the option to see your power and elevation also if you swim kickboard is now detected as a stroke type for a swim workout and i actually want to show you how heart rate zones works so i'm going to go ahead and load up an outdoor run real quick so i can show you how this function works so when you start one up you will see if you scroll down a little bit you have these different zones and if you're familiar with fitness and running and everything you will know that heart rate zones are very big and it will show your intensity level when you're training and it also gives you an alert when you leave a set heart rate zone so you can see i'm in zone one right now of course it will go up based on my bpm and i love all of the additional stats that you get with this like you can see there my elevation gain the way that looks just all the stuff we get in here our zones you know our circles our rings down here at the bottom everything just looks so much better and complete here in watchos 9. now you can also create custom workouts so for example if i had an indoor run but i wanted to create a custom indoor run i could do that if i go all the way down to the bottom here you can see we have custom if you tap on the little pencil right there you could change what your warm up is what you repeat you have a cool down you have your settings you have your workout views you have so much you could do with this custom section right here you can fully make your own custom workout for every individual thing you do which i think is just awesome another cool thing that watchos 9 does is that it auto detects your workout type and it switches it for you so for instance if you're a triathlete and you switch between running and then you dive in and go swimming your workout your watch will automatically adjust and change your workout from running to swimming there's also some pretty big changes in the sleep application so if you go into your sleep right here you can see it actually tells you what's new so it says apple watch can track how long you sleep along with your sleep stages and wake you up with an alarm on your wrist so you can see it says that there now what's cool is that it will actually show you how many times you wake up every night and it also shows you how much time you spend in a rim core and deep sleep stages also the whole ui looks so much better now in watchos 9 and also on ios 16. if we head into our settings and go to general and then down to dictation you will see we have a new section here a new toggle for auto punctuation so now you no longer need to say period or comma it will auto punctuate for you if you have this enabled and one thing to note is that this is only available in english for now another really cool feature is called apple watch mirroring so if you're on ios 16 and you go onto your iphone if you go down to your settings and accessibility and then go down a little bit you will see a new section here called apple watch mirroring if you go and tap on that and you enable that it will pull up this little view of an emulation of your apple watch it doesn't actually show the screen but on your apple watch you will see you have this little red outline around it which indicates that you are airplay mirroring to it or from it so you can see here we can basically emulate like we're on our apple watch so you can see when i do things like swipe up it pulls up the control center if i swipe down it pulls down the notification center i can use the crown right here so if i go ahead and press on it you can see it takes me into my applications i can press the side button right there to go into my app switcher view i can do everything i can normally do on my watch just from my phone there is a little bit of a learning curve to it it's not perfect and it does also depend on your internet connection speed to determine you know how much latency is involved obviously mine's not perfect it's pretty good but still not perfect there is a little bit of lag there which is expected but it is a pretty cool accessibility option another cool accessibility feature is quick actions which allows you to pinch and clinch your fist to perform certain actions on your phone so if you go into your iphone's watch settings if you go down to the watch application and settings go to accessibility and then down to quick actions you can see you could turn this on and you could do either full or minimal appearance now you do have to have assistive touch on for this to work so if you go into assistive touch and turn that on now you also have hand gestures right here and you can see you have the option to select what those hand gestures do so i put my watch on my wrist and based on my settings here my activation gesture is the double clinch so i'm going to double clench my wrist just like so and you can see it activates it and i could do a pinch to go forwards or a double pinch to go backwards and i could just basically control my whole apple watch just based on gestures which is pretty awesome we also have a slight change to siri so if we go ahead and invoke siri you can see we have more of an iphone like look to it so we have a little siri bubble down there right in the middle which looks better now one thing i cannot show you live right now but i will show a screenshot is that the entire nightstand interface turns red if you have low battery and you put it on the charger so i noticed this last night when my apple watch was below 10 and i put it on the charger i now like how everything turns red another small but nice feature especially if you're a swimmer is that if you go into your control center here and you enter in to water locks if you tap that right there now when you go to invoke it you will see that you no longer have to scroll your crown right here you have to press and hold on it so now you press and hold instead of endlessly scrolling which is a lot more convenient in my opinion which is good if you swim a lot and use that feature a lot now we also have some changes to the calendar so if we go into our calendar right here you will see if we tap on these three dots right there first off we can add a new event straight from our watch now so if you tap on new events you can put in the title the start date the end date everything like you can on the iphone you can now do that on the apple watch also if you go back to today if we go out of there and go back again you can see we have our month view where we can actually scroll through the different months also the reminders application now allows you to add the date and time location tags and notes so you can now add all of those to your reminders straight from the apple watch and then for the weather application if you go into weather you will notice that the font is bigger everything is just a little bit bigger in here and it's much easier to read at a glance when it's just on your wrist so there you have it those are over 25 of my favorite new features and changes found in watchos 9 beta 1. so of course we do have multiple betas to go and there will be more features and changes by the time watch os 9 gets released to the public which of course i will be making my big in-depth video when that comes out later this year most likely in september so if you guys want to see that make sure you subscribe to the channel also if you did enjoy this video i would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up but anyways guys thanks again for watching and i'll see you soon youwhat's up guys my name is brandon and watchos9 beta1 is here and after using it for a few days i wanted to share over 25 of my favorite features so far now i will be covering every single little change when the official version rolls out later this year but for now here's what's new in watchos 9. and i do have to mention before we get started that this software is only compatible with the apple watch series 4 and later so no more series 3 supports all right so first things first we have five new watch faces and watch os 9. so if we go ahead and haptic press right here if we go all the way over to press on the plus for new you can see you get a new little section here that shows you all of the new watch faces but i already added all of them so i will show you those right here so the first one is called astronomy so this is very similar to what we have on ios 16. you can see the time kind of goes behind the earth right there the globe which is pretty awesome if we have to press down right here we go to edit you can see we could change the font on at the watch face we have three different options to choose from there i think the modern looks the best personally if we go ahead over we have our views you have the earth you have the moon and then you have the solar system and then you can also set it up to do a random view as well and we have two styles here so we have random and we have a fool that shows the full earth and then lastly we have our complications section where we have two separate sections for complications now the next one is called lunar so you can see that's what it looks like right there it shows a different calendars so we have the chinese calendar hebrew islamic and those are the three that we have right there for the lunar cycle we also have our analog time or digital times you could choose which one you would like and then of course we can also change the colors right here so i'll do mine to like a blue color and then we have our four complications one in each corner and there's a nice view of what that one looks like with the blue color added in there now the next one we have is called metropolitan so this is my personal favorite of the new ones you can see it looks very nice it has kind of a old school look to it so if you go ahead to our edit right here you can of course choose the color and you can see a lot of that color with this watch face we go over to our complications we have one in each of the four corners and that's pretty much it but i think it's cool i think it's a very classic look of the watch face and i'm a fan of that one then we do also have a modular so we can change some things with modular we can change the colors now so this watch face obviously is not new but now we can change between all of these different colors here for the modular watch face we also have play time so you can see this is more of a kids oriented watch face you can see we have these little characters here that show the time and they kind of move when you touch on them if we go to edit you could change the color of the background of the watch face you could also change the background to be either on or off if you don't want that little confetti there you could turn that off if you would like to and there are no complications for this one and then finally we have portraits now portraits is not new but we can now do it with animals as well so animals can be detected as portraits not just people also in watchos 9 we have a new notification style so if we're using our watch like if we're actively using our watch you will see we have a new notification banner that comes up top and these notifications no longer take up the entire screen like they did before so you can see my little mail notification right there we also now have a dock in the notification center so if you have an app running in the background it will now get pinned and it will show up down here on the dock for easy access now if we head back to our watch face and go into our control center another little small change that i really like is the fact that the battery percentage is now blue so i find it to be much easier on the eyes especially at night it's a really small thing but something i did notice also down here we now have the text size control center toggle so when we tap on that not only do we have this toggle but we now also get nine different text size options in watchos 9 whereas before in watch os 8 we only had six options for text sizes we also have a lot of changes to workouts so apple put a big emphasis on workouts and health features of course that's one of the biggest benefits of an apple watch so now on a workout screen you get a lot more information so you have your activity rings you have heart rate zones you have power and elevation if you're hiking or biking and you're you know you're going upstairs you get the option to see your power and elevation also if you swim kickboard is now detected as a stroke type for a swim workout and i actually want to show you how heart rate zones works so i'm going to go ahead and load up an outdoor run real quick so i can show you how this function works so when you start one up you will see if you scroll down a little bit you have these different zones and if you're familiar with fitness and running and everything you will know that heart rate zones are very big and it will show your intensity level when you're training and it also gives you an alert when you leave a set heart rate zone so you can see i'm in zone one right now of course it will go up based on my bpm and i love all of the additional stats that you get with this like you can see there my elevation gain the way that looks just all the stuff we get in here our zones you know our circles our rings down here at the bottom everything just looks so much better and complete here in watchos 9. now you can also create custom workouts so for example if i had an indoor run but i wanted to create a custom indoor run i could do that if i go all the way down to the bottom here you can see we have custom if you tap on the little pencil right there you could change what your warm up is what you repeat you have a cool down you have your settings you have your workout views you have so much you could do with this custom section right here you can fully make your own custom workout for every individual thing you do which i think is just awesome another cool thing that watchos 9 does is that it auto detects your workout type and it switches it for you so for instance if you're a triathlete and you switch between running and then you dive in and go swimming your workout your watch will automatically adjust and change your workout from running to swimming there's also some pretty big changes in the sleep application so if you go into your sleep right here you can see it actually tells you what's new so it says apple watch can track how long you sleep along with your sleep stages and wake you up with an alarm on your wrist so you can see it says that there now what's cool is that it will actually show you how many times you wake up every night and it also shows you how much time you spend in a rim core and deep sleep stages also the whole ui looks so much better now in watchos 9 and also on ios 16. if we head into our settings and go to general and then down to dictation you will see we have a new section here a new toggle for auto punctuation so now you no longer need to say period or comma it will auto punctuate for you if you have this enabled and one thing to note is that this is only available in english for now another really cool feature is called apple watch mirroring so if you're on ios 16 and you go onto your iphone if you go down to your settings and accessibility and then go down a little bit you will see a new section here called apple watch mirroring if you go and tap on that and you enable that it will pull up this little view of an emulation of your apple watch it doesn't actually show the screen but on your apple watch you will see you have this little red outline around it which indicates that you are airplay mirroring to it or from it so you can see here we can basically emulate like we're on our apple watch so you can see when i do things like swipe up it pulls up the control center if i swipe down it pulls down the notification center i can use the crown right here so if i go ahead and press on it you can see it takes me into my applications i can press the side button right there to go into my app switcher view i can do everything i can normally do on my watch just from my phone there is a little bit of a learning curve to it it's not perfect and it does also depend on your internet connection speed to determine you know how much latency is involved obviously mine's not perfect it's pretty good but still not perfect there is a little bit of lag there which is expected but it is a pretty cool accessibility option another cool accessibility feature is quick actions which allows you to pinch and clinch your fist to perform certain actions on your phone so if you go into your iphone's watch settings if you go down to the watch application and settings go to accessibility and then down to quick actions you can see you could turn this on and you could do either full or minimal appearance now you do have to have assistive touch on for this to work so if you go into assistive touch and turn that on now you also have hand gestures right here and you can see you have the option to select what those hand gestures do so i put my watch on my wrist and based on my settings here my activation gesture is the double clinch so i'm going to double clench my wrist just like so and you can see it activates it and i could do a pinch to go forwards or a double pinch to go backwards and i could just basically control my whole apple watch just based on gestures which is pretty awesome we also have a slight change to siri so if we go ahead and invoke siri you can see we have more of an iphone like look to it so we have a little siri bubble down there right in the middle which looks better now one thing i cannot show you live right now but i will show a screenshot is that the entire nightstand interface turns red if you have low battery and you put it on the charger so i noticed this last night when my apple watch was below 10 and i put it on the charger i now like how everything turns red another small but nice feature especially if you're a swimmer is that if you go into your control center here and you enter in to water locks if you tap that right there now when you go to invoke it you will see that you no longer have to scroll your crown right here you have to press and hold on it so now you press and hold instead of endlessly scrolling which is a lot more convenient in my opinion which is good if you swim a lot and use that feature a lot now we also have some changes to the calendar so if we go into our calendar right here you will see if we tap on these three dots right there first off we can add a new event straight from our watch now so if you tap on new events you can put in the title the start date the end date everything like you can on the iphone you can now do that on the apple watch also if you go back to today if we go out of there and go back again you can see we have our month view where we can actually scroll through the different months also the reminders application now allows you to add the date and time location tags and notes so you can now add all of those to your reminders straight from the apple watch and then for the weather application if you go into weather you will notice that the font is bigger everything is just a little bit bigger in here and it's much easier to read at a glance when it's just on your wrist so there you have it those are over 25 of my favorite new features and changes found in watchos 9 beta 1. so of course we do have multiple betas to go and there will be more features and changes by the time watch os 9 gets released to the public which of course i will be making my big in-depth video when that comes out later this year most likely in september so if you guys want to see that make sure you subscribe to the channel also if you did enjoy this video i would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up but anyways guys thanks again for watching and i'll see you soon you\n"