HOW TO Personalize your Apple Watch behavior

See your apps

By default, pressing the Digital Crown will take you to this screen. Each icon here is an app, and as you’d expect tapping the icon will then launch that app. Turn the Digital Crown to zoom in and out for a better view.

Move them around

If you long–press an app icon, you’ll see a screen with three options: Grid View (the view you already have), List View, and Edit Apps. Select Edit Apps and you can slide the icons around to reorder them or remove some altogether.

Navigate the list

If you find the Grid View hard to decipher because of similar–looking app icons, long–press and choose List View. This provides a simple alphabetical list, which you move between by swiping up and down or turning the Digital Crown.

Use the Dock

Press the side button (the long button below the Digital Crown) and you’ll be taken to the Dock, which is a scrollable selection of recently opened apps. Simply scroll to the one you want and tap it to open that app on your Apple Watch.

Swap the Dock

If you’d rather see the same list of apps in the Dock every time, go to Settings > Dock, and tap Favorites instead of Recents. You’ll need to use the Watch app on your iPhone to mark specific apps as favorites.

Adjust everything

In Settings > Display & Brightness, you can make more important changes to how your Apple Watch looks, including the brightness of the display, the default text size, and using bold text to make text in lists and apps easier to read.

Change the behavior

In the same part of Settings, you can adjust how your Watch wakes up. If you don’t want it to wake when you raise your wrist or rotate the Digital Crown, turn those options off. You can also specify how long your Watch should wake for.

Turn back the clock

In Settings you can change how your Apple Watch behaves in apps; by default, it will return to the Watch Face after two minutes of inactivity, but you can change that to an hour. You can also specify per–app settings.

Explore Accessibility

As you’d expect from Apple, there are lots of good accessibility options in your Apple Watch settings, with visual options including improved on–screen contrast, reduced color, and reduced motion in apps and menus.