When the Apple Watch first launched in 2015, it wasn’t clear exactly what the device was for. Was it a mini-iPhone, intended to replicate its big brother’s features on your wrist? Or was it a tool for informal communications, punctuated by scribbles and heart beats?
Eventually, the device’s purpose become more clear. Apple sells the Watch as a fitness and wellness tracker with some convenient peripheral functions (e.g. notifications and quick replies).
Given this emphasis on well-being, it’s surprising to me that there seem to be no great meditation apps for the Apple Watch. Oh, these apps exist; they’re just really bad.
Breathe
Well, not all of them, I guess. Apple’s first-party Breathe app is well-designed and fun to use for quick hits of mindfulness. But it’s not really designed to serve as a full-featured interval timer. For that, I’ve turned (without much success) to a variety of third-party apps:
Headspace
Take Headspace, for example. It’s the king in the mindfulness space, raking in tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually. You’d think they’d have the resources to deliver decent Watch app; the company has two dozen open engineer positions at the moment.
But, no, Headspace’s Apple Watch app is pretty sad. Even though its iPhone app is whimsical and well-designed, on the Watch, it’s ugly and weirdly spartan. It boasts two underbaked features: a "Touch" exercise that doesn’t quite work and "SOS", a single guided meditation for emergencies (e.g. panic attacks).
In an ideal world, Headspace offer its rich library of guided sessions on your wrist; at the very least, I wish I could continue a meditation series from where I left off last time.
Insight Timer
Like Headspace, Insight Timer offers its own diverse library of guided courses, but I prefer to set up my own meditation sessions using its interval timer. I love being able to assign different bells to different stages of my meditation practice: high tones for preparation, deeper chimes for focused breathing, and even a gong to round out the exercise.
On the Watch, Insight Timer offers none of these features. I wish I could launch my preprogrammed sets of bell-marked intervals. Instead, the app offers generic timers for meditation and yoga, alongside a shortcut to launch their guided, seven-day introduction to meditation.
Seconds
The Watch app that comes the closest to meeting my needs isn’t actually a "mindfulness" app at all. It’s an interval timer called Seconds. Its target audience is fitness buffs who want to time complex workouts like high-intensity interval training.
But Seconds also supports interval sets for mindfulness sessions. Unlike with the other apps, it allows you to create any number of intervals of arbitrary length and sync the program to your Watch for "playback."
Unfortunately, it has a few fatal flaws as a meditation timer. First, it really is meant to be a workout app; at the end of the meditation, the app shows the calories burned—hardly a relevant statistic for pillow-sitting. More problematically, custom alert sounds on the Watch seem to be broken. Seconds will play both my custom "Tibetan bell" and a harsh mechanical beep—a dissonant combination that I find distracting.
Closing thoughts
The dearth of Apple Watch meditation apps may be a symptom of a deeper issue. There are plenty of other app categories in which there isn’t a single decent option, and many high-profile companies have removed Apple Watch support altogether. Three and a half years after the device’s initial launch, the Apple Watch app ecosystem may be getting worse, rather than better.
That’s harshing my zen. ■
Matt Hauger 