A week after releasing the second beta of watchOS 11.2, Apple has seeded its third testing version. At the moment, it’s unclear what’s new with it. Unlike other software updates from Apple, watchOS 11 has already delivered all the features announced at WWDC 2024.
With watchOS 11.1, Apple added two Apple Intelligence features powered by iPhone 15 Pro or newer devices, which include:
- Reduce interruptions: An all-new Focus Mode understands the content of your notifications and shows you the ones that might need immediate attention, like a text about picking up your child from daycare later today.
- Summarization: Apple Intelligence can summarize all your notifications.
Since watchOS 11 is a mild update after a packed watchOS 10 release, it’s unclear what Apple has in store for Apple Watch users. For example, the company unveiled the new sleep apnea detection with watchOS 11. However, it still needs to be rolled out to more countries. With watchOS 11.2 beta 3, we might see it coming to more regions.
Apple says sleep apnea is a potentially serious condition where breathing stops repeatedly during sleep. “The condition, which is estimated to impact more than 1 billion people worldwide, goes undiagnosed in most cases. If left untreated, sleep apnea can have important consequences on health, including an increased risk of hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, and cardiac issues.”
To detect sleep apnea, the Apple Watch uses an accelerometer to monitor small movements at the wrist that are associated with interruptions in normal respiratory patterns. This is tracked by a new Apple Watch metric called Breathing Disturbances.
While some of these disturbances are normal, they are important to track as they can be used to help understand restfulness of sleep and, when occurring frequently over multiple nights, may be associated with sleep apnea. Users can view their nightly Breathing Disturbances in the Health app, where they are classified as elevated or not elevated and can be viewed over a one-month, six-month, or one-year period.
Alongside watchOS 11.2 beta 3, Apple also released the third testing version of tvOS 18.2 and visionOS 2.2 a few days ago. We’ll let you know if we find anything new in these betas.
