WatchOS 10 will introduce an entirely new widget system to interact with the Apple Watch. Bloomberg. In the latest issue of the Power newsletter, Gurman announced that widgets will become a “central part” of the Apple Watch interface with ‌watchOS 10‌. He compared the new system to Glances, the widget interface that launched on the original Apple Watch and then shelved for several years, and the widget style iOS 14 brought to the iPhone.

The new interface will apparently “look” like the ‌Siri‌ watch face introduced in watchOS 4, but will overlay any Apple Watch watch face. “It’s also similar to particle stacks, a feature in iOS and iPadOS that allows users to stack and navigate multiple widgets into a single widget,” added Gurman.

The plan is to let users scroll through a number of different widgets for activity tracking, weather, stock indicators, calendar appointments, and more, instead of launching apps.

Apple is also apparently testing changes to the functions performed by the buttons on the Apple Watch. For example, pressing the Digital Crown can now launch a new widget view instead of going to the home screen.

Gürman believes this move is an admission that iPhone-like apps “do not always make sense on the watch” because “Apple Watch apps have barely caught on.” A radical departure from the app-centric experience that current Apple Watch users are used to, Apple may make the new interface optional.

The changes, Gurman says, are one of the biggest software updates since the Apple Watch launch and will be the most significant change to the Apple Watch this year, and are only part of minor hardware updates expected to be released later this year.