Good news for Apple Watch owners who don’t want to clutter up their Watch with unused apps. With the release of the new watchOS 6 operating system later this year, Apple will allow Apple Watch device owners to remove many more of the built-in, first-party apps from their smartwatch — including previously unremovable apps like Alarm, Timer, Stopwatch, Remote, Camera Remote, Radio and others, as well as health apps like ECG, Breathe, Noise and Cycle Tracking.
Currently, Apple Watch owners can easily remove the third-party apps they install from the App Store… Additionally, users can opt to remove many of the built-in apps from their iPhone, which also then removes its Apple Watch counterpart. But the dedicated Watch apps (like Timer or Radio) couldn’t be removed from the Watch because they had no iOS counterpart to uninstall.
That will change with the launch of watchOS 6…
MacDailyNews Take: Some apps will remain non-deletable on Apple Watch (Heart Rate, Messages), but this is likely to be as popular a move among Apple Watch users as the ability to delete baked in Apple apps on iPhoen and iPad was with the release of iOS 10 in 2016.
I don’t use a lot of apps on my Watch and this article is a reminder to clear them out. The question now is the impact on battery life is there is a long list of unused apps. The battery cost per hour is obviously trivial, but is there a noticeable cost when the watch is loaded with unused apps?