WWDC19 notes - watchOS

Jun 8, 2019

WWDC is one, if not the one, Apple keynote I like the most. I understand very little of coding, nonetheless the pragmatic style of the conference wins my heart every year.
I chose to break my notes in separate articles about one platform Apple unveiled at the time. The intent of this series is not to be comprehensive: if you still haven't read in depth about what Apple unveiled, please do so on some other better equipped websites.
This is piece number 1: watchOS

Focus sharpening

As years pass by, Apple is deepening its focus on Apple Watch, and every release of watchOS bears the traits of this sharpening. Fitness monitoring is gaining time depth with Activity Trends, a relief with respect to the demotivation a few of uncompleted daily circles can give.
On the health side, Noise and Cycle are coming, one for ambient noise monitoring and high volume alerting, the other for women to track their menstrual cycle.
The first app reinforces what I had already said in my Apple Watch Series 4 article: together with fall detection, ambient noise monitoring and alert can be gold features for people who work alone and/or in loud environments. In this scenarios, Apple Watches can replace much more expensive devices and have the plus that will be worn with more enthusiasm by workers themselves.
As of Cycle, the first thing that came to my mind is that this feature will probably kill some existing apps that do the same thing, I know a couple of them because my fiancé uses them regularly. The more I thought about it, though, the more something else surfaced from my memory: recently few of those period tracking apps were found sharing very personal informations with Facebook - a company whose shame apparently has no limit. All this remembered, I must say I didn't feel so sorry for them anymore.
Voice memos and Calculator are nice to finally have on the watch, their addition seemed like a no-brainer looking back; native watch apps are also welcome and might be the future coming, but let's see how this evolves with time.
Finally, watchOS 6 is bringing some new watch faces with it: it's not the deregulation I was hoping for, but they look fun and nice anyway.

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