According to MakeUseOf, Meta announced on November 4 that WhatsApp is finally coming to Apple Watch after years of user requests. The messaging app, which has approximately 3 billion monthly active users according to Statista, will let Apple Watch users read full messages, take calls, send replies, and view images directly from their wrist. The announcement came via a Meta blog post that promised many “most-requested features” though WhatsApp head Will Cathcart hasn’t publicly commented. Users can download the latest WhatsApp version from the App Store, then enable it through the Watch app on their iPhone. The app still requires your phone nearby to function, similar to the Wear OS version released in July 2023.
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Long Overdue Arrival
Here’s the thing – this feels like something that should have happened years ago. The Apple Watch debuted in 2015, and we’re just getting WhatsApp support now? That’s nearly a decade of Apple Watch users missing one of the world’s most popular messaging apps on their wrist. Outside the US where WhatsApp dominates daily communication, this delay must have been particularly frustrating. Basically, if you’ve been using both an Apple Watch and WhatsApp regularly, you’ve essentially had a compromised experience until now.
What You Get (And What You Don’t)
The good news is you get most of the core features: reading messages, sending replies (via typing or dictation), emoji reactions, viewing images and stickers, and even taking calls. But there are some significant limitations. You can’t start new group chats from the watch, archived chats aren’t accessible, and you’re stuck responding to existing threads only. Compare that to iMessage on Apple Watch where you can compose new messages to any contact. And according to early testing, the app is reportedly buggy with buttons sometimes freezing and requiring restarts. So it’s definitely a version 1.0 experience.
Why Now and What’s Next
The timing is interesting considering Meta’s rumored to be working on its own smartwatch. Is this just playing nice with Apple before launching competitive hardware? Or finally giving users what they’ve wanted for years? Probably both. Looking ahead, we’ll likely see updates that fix the bugs and add missing features like new chat creation. But the bigger question is whether Meta will eventually make the Apple Watch app work independently without needing your phone nearby. That would be a game-changer, though it would require significant backend changes to how WhatsApp currently operates.
