watchOS 27 removes Walkie-Talkie and rewires the Digital Crown

Clicking the Digital Crown has opened the full app launcher since watchOS 1. In watchOS 27 it doesn't.

Apple's next watch software arrives later this month. Zac Hall, who has run it at 9to5Mac since the first beta landed in June, has written up three things it takes away, and the change to that first click is the one most people will hit on day one. Pressing the crown now brings up the dynamic app grid: five apps the watch has picked for you, the Siri app, and an icon that opens everything else. Your full grid is still in there. You tap through to it, or scroll the crown up to reach it.

Fewer icons and bigger tap targets is a fair trade on a screen that size, and anyone who keeps four apps in rotation will probably never notice. It costs the people who had learned where their icons sat. A layout you have memorised stops being a layout and becomes muscle memory, and a grid that reshuffles itself can't do that.

Siri is pushed to the front across Apple's OS 27 updates, and on the wrist that means the assistant occupies a slot your most-used app used to have.

The Siri app sitting in that first row is the part that carries beyond the watch. Siri is pushed to the front across Apple's OS 27 updates, and on the wrist that means the assistant occupies a slot your most-used app used to have.

The second removal is on the same crown. Double-clicking it used to jump you between the last two apps you had open, and it now does exactly what a single click does. Nothing has taken its place.

Walkie-Talkie is the third, and it is the only one of the three that was a whole app. It let two Apple Watch owners talk to each other in real time with no phone in between, and it worked only between watches. Leaving it switched on parked a yellow icon on your watch face for as long as it stayed on.

None of this is unusual for a watch update. The last real change to this corner of watchOS was Apple taking away the click that centred the app grid before you returned to the watch face.

Hall has been running watchOS 27 since June and says he would trade all three of these back for the Explorer watch face, which Apple removed even though watch faces are already easy to delete yourself.