Apple Finally Added My Most Wanted App to Apple Watch
The more I use my Apple Watch, the more I miss one app more than all the others. The Apple Watch is great for managing notifications, checking reminders, and tracking workouts. But the one thing it’s never had is a proper Notes app.
On my iPhone, I use the Notes app religiously. I use it for travel planning, for research, for planning long articles, and I prefer using Notes for checklists instead of reminders. When I leave my iPhone at home and just use my watch, these are the features I miss the most. It would be so convenient to be able to check off to-dos or reference notes right from my wrist. And if I could quickly add a new idea to a research note without picking up my iPhone, that would be great too.
It looks like I’m not the only one who wants this (my editor Jake Peterson is also looking forward to it), because in watchOS 26, Apple is finally adding a real Notes app to the Apple Watch.
How the Notes app for Apple Watch works
The Notes app on Apple Watch will work similarly to the Reminders app, allowing you to see a list of all your recent notes. You can even pin notes to the top of the app if you regularly access them.
And yes, standard Notes formatting is supported, so you’ll see headings, emoji, images, and everything else, all on your wrist. Most importantly for me, the Notes app will also support checklists, so you’ll finally be able to check off things in the Notes app right from your wrist.
If you want to add something to a note or create a new one, you can do even that. You can use the dictation feature to take quick notes, or you can use the keyboard to type (although I find that very tedious).
The Notes app will ship with the watchOS 26 update, which will be available to the public in fall 2025. You can currently get it as part of the developer beta, but I highly recommend against installing the developer beta on your Apple Watch . Developer betas are notoriously buggy, but at least on iPhones there are ways to roll back if something goes wrong. On the Apple Watch, you can’t downgrade or reset the OS, so you’ll have to wait for Apple to release a new beta update or a stable build. This goes for the public betas too, so I’d just recommend waiting for the full release. But for now, I’m writing these warnings more as a reminder for myself than for you. Because I can’t wait to start using the Notes app on my Apple Watch, and it’s going to be hard to wait until fall to do so.