watchOS 27 Takes Three Things Off Your Apple Watch, and Two of Them Are Muscle Memory

An app leaves, and two gestures change meaning

Most software updates are described by what they add. This one is worth reading the other way round. According to 9to5Mac, which has been running watchOS 27 since the first beta in June, three things Apple Watch owners currently use will not survive the update: the Walkie-Talkie app, the double-click of the Digital Crown, and the full app launcher that a single click has opened since the very first Apple Watch.

None of the three is a headline feature. All three are things people do without thinking, which is precisely what makes them noticeable when they stop working.

Walkie-Talkie: eight years without a single meaningful update

Walkie-Talkie disappeared in the first developer beta of watchOS 27 back in June, vanishing from both the app list and Control Center, with no way to reinstall it. Apple has not confirmed the removal, and it does not usually comment on features it withdraws.

The app arrived with watchOS 5 in 2018 as a push-to-talk channel between two Apple Watches, running over Wi-Fi or cellular on FaceTime's infrastructure. That last detail explains both its appeal and its fragility: because it rode on FaceTime rather than radio, it worked at any distance, but it also inherited FaceTime's dependence on a live connection to Apple's servers. A walkie-talkie that needs a data path to Cupertino behaves very differently from one that needs line of sight, and the connection failures owners have complained about for years follow from that design.

The feature also had a bad first year. Shortly after launch, Apple temporarily disabled it after the discovery of a vulnerability that could let someone listen through another person's microphone without their knowledge. The fix arrived in watchOS 5.3. What did not arrive, across eight major watchOS releases, was any meaningful development of the app.

There is one practical consequence worth knowing. Because the Apple Watch cannot run software Apple has not approved for it, and because no third-party developer has access to the system-level push-to-talk plumbing Walkie-Talkie used, nothing on the App Store replicates it exactly. Households that used it between floors, and crews that used it on site, are looking at audio messages in Messages or a FaceTime audio call instead, both of which require the other person to do something, which is the whole thing Walkie-Talkie removed.

The Digital Crown loses its second job

Double-clicking the Digital Crown used to switch between the two most recent destinations: an app and the watch face, or two apps. In watchOS 27, according to 9to5Mac's testing, a double-click now does the same thing as a single click.

On a device with this few controls, that matters more than it would on an iPhone. The Apple Watch offers a crown, a side button, and a small number of gestures. Removing one of them does not simply remove a shortcut; it removes one of a handful of ways to tell the watch to do something without navigating. Apple has not said whether the double-click will be reassigned to another function later.

One click now opens a shortlist, not everything

Since watchOS 1 in 2015, a single click of the crown from the watch face or inside an app has opened the full app launcher. watchOS 27 replaces that with what Apple calls the dynamic app grid: five suggested apps, the Siri app, and an icon leading to the complete grid. Users who want the full list can tap that icon or scroll the crown upward.

The Siri app sitting in that shortlist is not an isolated choice. Apple's OS 27 releases across platforms put the new Siri in front of users by default, and the watch is the smallest screen on which that decision has to be made. On a display this size, promoting one app means demoting roughly twenty.

What to check before you update

The update has not shipped yet. Apple is expected to announce release dates for watchOS 27 and its sister updates at the September 9 event, and based on previous years the software could arrive within days of that. Anyone who relies on Walkie-Talkie for coordination at work or at home has a short window to set up a replacement, and anyone who uses the double-click reflex several times a day should expect a week of reaching for something that is no longer there.

For readers weighing whether to update immediately or wait, the calculation is unusually simple this year: nothing in this list is a bug that a point release will fix. Two of the three are deliberate interface decisions, and the third looks like a quiet retirement rather than an omission.

New Apple Watch models are expected at the same event; see our preview of what is known about the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. They will ship with watchOS 27 already installed, which means buyers will meet these three changes without ever having chosen them.