We"re just about three months away from WWDC, where Apple will undoubtedly unveil the next major iterations of all of its operating systems. It seems like the cat"s out of the bag on watchOS 7 though, as 9to5Mac today published a report outlining all of the new goodies.
As you"d expect, there are new watch faces and new watch face features. There"s a new Infograph Pro face, which goes alongside Infograph and Infograph Modular, and it includes a tachymeter, which measures speed and distance over time. Also on the way is the ability to share watch faces with other users from the Watch app. That doesn"t mean that there will be support for third-party watch faces; instead, you"ll be sharing your custom configurations.
While you"ve always been able to make a watch face from a photo, you"ll now be able to make watch faces from shared albums. What"s neat about that is that it won"t actually have to be a photo that you"ve taken, so it"s pretty much expanding where that photo can come from.
With all of the watch face stuff out of the way, it looks like this will finally be the year that Apple Watch users get sleep tracking, something that was reported throughout 2019. Unfortunately, the report didn"t specify whether you"ll need new hardware for this, as Apple will likely introduce a new Watch in September alongside this year"s iPhones.
Next up are features for kids. Basically, you"ll be able to get an Apple Watch for your child without getting them an iPhone. Right now, you can only use one Apple Watch with an iPhone at a time, although you can pair as many as you want. With watchOS 7, you"ll be able to use a second Watch, and one that"s custom configured to show what you want it to. One of those configuration options is called Schooltime, which will let you set parental controls for what can be seen during certain hours.
To wrap things up, the report says that there will be a toggle for Sleep mode and Noise detection in the Control Center and that the app architecture is changing. While the Apple Watch supports standalone apps, they"re based on the old extensions architecture, so that will no longer be the case.