The watch app gets a sky

A watch screen gets looked at for about two seconds, and Forecast Bar was spending both of them on numbers. The main screen has been rebuilt around the opposite idea: before you have read anything, the screen should already have told you something.

So it has a sky now — not a stock picture, but a background drawn from where the sun actually is above your location and what the weather is actually doing. Cloud cover greys and flattens it, a storm darkens it, fog lifts it. It runs edge to edge behind the clock and fades to black, so every card below it still sits on a dark screen.

The colour comes from the sun's real elevation, not from a clock reading "evening". It moves between bands instead of stepping between them, so the screen you looked at an hour ago is not quite the screen you are looking at now, and the glow sits where the sun actually is rather than in a fixed corner.

Once the sun is properly down and there is not too much cloud in the way, the stars come out. The moon takes the sun's place in the glow, at its own position and its own phase.

What the sky deliberately does not do is rain on you. Falling rain and snow were built, looked at on a watch, and taken out again — at that size a thin streak reads as a scratch on the glass rather than as weather. And it knows when to stop moving altogether: with Always On, Low Power Mode or Reduce Motion the sky holds still.

The days used to be a strip you pushed sideways, one column at a time. They are a list now, and the point of the list is the bars: every one is scaled to the same week, so a warm day's bar is visibly longer and further right than a cold one's.

That turns "is it worth taking a coat on Friday" into a shape rather than five numbers you have to hold in your head and compare. Today's row carries a marker showing where the temperature is right now inside its own range.

The bottom of the main screen was a table of small numbers in mismatched type. It is a grid of tiles now, and each one is drawn the way its particular reading wants to be read: humidity as a ring that fills, wind as a compass needle, UV in the standard bands, pressure as a trend, dew point as a word you can actually act on.

Seventeen readings are available and you choose which of them appear, and in what order — which is new. The list used to be fixed.

Tap one and its chart opens on that reading. Wind is the exception that goes somewhere better: it opens the Wind screen.

If your charts kept opening on UV Index, this is why. Tapping a data tile used to write that reading in as the one the Charts section remembers, so a single curious tap three days ago quietly redecided what you saw every time afterwards. Now a tile opens its chart for the visit and leaves your choice alone; only the buttons under the chart change it. Charts open on Temperature until you pick something else.

Those buttons can also say their names rather than show icons, from Charts settings — Temp, Feels, Rain, Wind, and so on. A droplet and a dewdrop are not that easy to tell apart at this size.

A Pollen tile, new in this round. The level in a word, a five-band gauge showing where in the scale it falls, and underneath it the type actually driving the count — tree, grass, weed or mold, which is the part that decides whether today is your problem or somebody else's.

It is a United States reading from The Weather Company's station network and it is part of Gold. The watch only asks for it once the tile is on your grid, so the first forecast after you add it fetches again; and when there is no reading to show, the tile isn't drawn rather than showing you a dash.

Sun & Moon is a new screen, and it draws the day as an arc rather than as two times in a list. The puck rides it where the sun actually is, with sunrise and sunset at its feet and the length of the day in the middle. Further down are first and last light, and the moon's phase.

Wind is the other new screen, and the whole of it now fits on the screen. It first shipped as a big compass with the speed inside it and everything else a scroll away, which is a beautiful way to answer one third of the question. So the compass got smaller and moved left, the marker moved onto the ring where it can actually be read against the directions, and the speed, the description, the direction and the gusts came up alongside it.

Underneath, the next twelve hours with its low and its peak — no scrolling on a 46mm watch. Knowing the wind is 8 mph is worth much less than knowing what it does by five o'clock.

The gentlest end of the scale also stopped calling itself "Light Air", which is a term of art rather than an answer. It says Calm.

The compass is sized from the screen, not from the big one, so the 40mm watch gets the same layout rather than a squeezed version of it.

The hourly strip has a Style setting now. Plain is the aligned columns it has always drawn. Curve is the one above: the hour labels stay fixed along the top while each hour's icon and temperature float by how warm that hour is, so the shape of the day arrives before any of the numbers do. It is the iPhone's Timeline curve, on the wrist.

**And Chart replaces the strip outright**, drawing the same window as one temperature curve with the chance of rain behind it. Three different answers to "what do the next twelve hours look like", none of them more correct than the others, which is exactly why it is a setting. It syncs with your iPhone, and it is in Watch Layout there too.

Tap the chart and the full charts open on that curve, ready for the Digital Crown — the chevron in its corner says so. And the Charts section underneath does not draw the same temperature line a card later: while the strip is a chart, a Charts section left on Temperature switches to the chance of rain, or to wind on a dry day.

Every day's screen now opens under a sky tinted for that day's weather, with the date, the low and the high, and the chance of rain sitting on it. Below that: that day's own hours, the narrative forecast, and a chart of the day.

Every day's screen now carries that day's own hourly strip, not just today's — scoped to that date in the location's own time zone, with its sunrise and sunset marked in it. Looking up Friday and being told only its high and its low was always a slightly hollow answer.

The heading reads the low first, on the left, with the high beside it. So does the range bar on the main screen, so does every row of the Week Ahead, and all of them are scaled to the same week — which they were not, quite, in the first build. A day cannot look warmer in one place than in another any more.

Further down the same screen, the day and the night are summarised separately — each with its own icon, chance of rain, humidity, cloud cover and wind, and UV on the day side. A clear afternoon followed by a wet night is two different pieces of information, and it used to be averaged into one.

Underneath sits that date's sun row. Sunrise and sunset are given in the location's own time zone now, so a saved city three zones away finally reads correctly instead of being converted to your wrist.

If the sky is not what you want from a watch, it is one setting away from gone. The Compact header drops it entirely for a tight block of numbers on black, at about half the height, so the next section starts on the first screen.

That is one of three presets. Glance is now-and-next and nothing else, Balanced is the arrangement most people will want, and Everything turns on every section there is — each of them one tap.

The main screen used to be reorderable and nothing more. Now every section can be shown, hidden or moved, the tiles are yours to pick, and the hourly strip and the week have their own options.

The Layout screen opens with a live preview of your own main screen at the top — your order, your hidden sections, your header style, your weather. Not a drawing of one. The old preview was a fixed picture that had quietly drifted out of date.

Data Points now sits above Week Ahead out of the box, because the readings you check are worth more scroll-priority than a week you look at once a day. If you had already put the sections in your own order, yours is left exactly as it is; only a layout nobody had touched moves.

The watch app's own Settings screen used to open on complications, with the watch app's own layout second, and it closed with a short lecture on how to add a complication to a watch face. The order is the other way round now, and the lecture is gone — you were in the app's settings, not on a watch face.

On the phone, Watch Layout does the same job on a screen you can actually see. The watch pinned at the top is not an illustration of your watch screen — it is your watch screen, the same views the watch runs, with your own weather in them. Reorder a section and it moves. Hide one and it goes.

There is a 46mm / 40mm toggle so you can check the small screen, chips that jump the preview to a section, and preset cards that show each preset rendered with your weather before you commit to it.

The timeline under the watch runs midnight to midnight. Drag it and the day goes by: the sky turns from dawn to blue to gold to black, the sunset cell slides along the hourly strip, the sun travels its arc, and the temperature follows the hourly forecast. A Now button snaps it back.

There is a Sample Day to scrub through as well — morning fog, an afternoon storm, a clear night — so you can see every state the screen can be in without waiting for the weather to do it.

All of it was designed for a 40mm screen as well as a 46mm one, which is the part of a redesign that is easy to say and tedious to actually do: no widths derived from the big screen, nothing truncated, nothing shrunk past the point of being readable.

The watch has had the numbers for a long time. What it has not had is a way to look at the shape of them. A high and a low tell you very little about whether the rain arrives before you leave or after you get back, and a strip of twelve icons is a summary, not something you can interrogate.

11.7 puts a real chart on the watch. Open it and turn the Digital Crown to move through the forecast hour by hour — and keep turning, because it does not stop at the end of today. The chart rolls on into tomorrow and the day after, about a week out, which is further than the watch app has ever been able to show you.

Choose what it plots: temperature, feels like, chance of rain, wind, humidity, dew point, heat index, wind chill, UV, cloud cover, pressure or visibility, drawn the same way as the charts on iPhone so there is nothing new to learn. The main screen carries a Charts section covering the next twelve hours, and every day's detail screen now opens with that day's chart rather than a list.

Heat Index and Wind Chill have charts of their own, and tapping either tile opens its chart. Each follows the forecast hour by hour, with the air temperature it is measured against in the readout.

On a mild day neither one applies, and both simply equal the temperature. Rather than leave you wondering why the "wind chill" is 72º, the chart says Not in effect.

The two tiles read the same current observation as the Feels Like tile, so the three always agree: the heat index is the feels-like temperature when it is above the air temperature, and the wind chill is the feels-like temperature when it is below.

The location list opens at once, with the list the watch already has, and checks your synced list in the background — updating in place, and keeping what it had if that check fails.

The city your iPhone calls Home is marked with a house, as it is on the phone. Current Location keeps its arrow, even when you are at home.

A Sunrise & Sunset Lock Screen widget, in all three shapes. The circular one is a thick ring that fills toward the next event, with the sun riding the fill, the time large in the middle and no AM or PM, because the glyph in the ring's opening already tells you which one you are waiting for. The rectangular one names the event, counts down to it, and gives you the other end of the day and how much daylight there is between them. The inline one puts all of that on the line above the clock.

And on the iPhone, "Show Temperature as Curve" stopped being a switch. It is two cards side by side now, each drawing three real hours of tomorrow's forecast in its own style, so you choose the one that looks right rather than flicking a toggle and going to look for what changed.

The rain and Storm Intercept Live Activities stay readable when a phone call shares the Dynamic Island. The squeezed pill used to break "Rain" over two lines; it now shows the rain icon on its own when the word will not fit, and the expanded readings stay on one line.