How to Use Smart Stack Widgets on the Apple Watch
Posted on
by
Kirk McElhearn
watchOS has changed a lot over the years, and one of the biggest changes came in 2023, with the addition of widgets and the Smart Stack in watchOS 10. These features were refined in watchOS 11, and have proven to be very practical for many users.
Apple says: “The Smart Stack is a set of widgets that uses information such as the time, your location, and your activity to automatically display the most relevant widgets at the appropriate time in your day.” The Smart Stack also displays Live Activities, such as the weather, audio that you’re playing, sports scores, and more, depending on which apps and widgets you have installed on your Apple Watch.
For example, when I wake up in the morning, I see widgets for my sleep (I track my sleep with the Apple Watch), vitals, the weather, my upcoming calendar events, and other widgets according to the day and context. When writing this article, the first widget I saw was this one:
This is because the weather conditions were extremely windy at the time, and watchOS knew that this was “timely” information.
View the Smart Stack
To view the Smart Stack, either scroll up with the Digital Crown, use Double Tap, or swipe up from the bottom of the watch’s display. If you scroll, you can keep scrolling through all the available widgets. If you use Double Tap, you can keep tapping to cycle through the widgets. To return to the watch face, press the Digital Crown.
To learn about Double Tap, see our article, How to use Double Tap on Apple Watch, and What to Do if It’s Not Working.
Smart Stack settings
Smart Stack settings, available in the Watch app on your iPhone or in Settings on the watch, give you many options for this feature. (Confusingly, you tap Smart Stack in the Watch app, but it displays Live Activities at the top of the screen.)
You can enable live activities, and you can set them to auto-launch, which means they are visible on the watch screen when they launch. You can set live activities to display even if your wrist isn’t raised. You can set whether media apps – Music, Podcast, Audiobooks, etc. – display as live activities, and whether they launch as widgets or apps. And for a number of built-in apps, you can individually choose if you want them to launch as live activities. Further down, you can choose to mirror live activities from iPhone apps that don’t have equivalents on the Apple Watch, if the developer has added this functionality.
Customize the Smart Stack
You can also customize the Smart Stack on the Apple Watch, and you can “pin” widgets, so they are always accessible, even if watchOS doesn’t think you need to see them. You can use this as a quick way to launch apps on your Apple Watch: just scroll or Double Tap until you get to the widget, then tap the widget to open the app.
To do this, display widgets, then touch and hold any widget until you see a display like this:
Tap the + widget, and you see a number of suggestions; below these, you see all the apps on your watch that have widgets. Tap an app to see its available widgets; some apps only offer one widget, while some apps offer multiple widgets. Tap a widget to add it to the Smart Stack.
Tap the red – icon to remove a widget. To pin a widget, tap the small yellow pushpin icon at the right of the widget. This pins it to the bottom of the pinned widgets on your watch.
As you go through your day, your Smart Stack changes, showing timely widgets and live activities along with other widgets you’ve added to the Smart Stack.
Smart Stack is a great way to view different information on your watch according to the time of day, context, and live activities, and using Double Tap allows you to quickly scroll through timely widgets.
How can I learn more?
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