11 Of The Best Free Apple Watch Apps You Can Download In 2025 – SlashGear

The Apple Watch is one of those devices that no one really needs, but once you get one, it’s hard to imagine going without it. Think of it as an extension of your iPhone — you can check notifications and perform basic Siri tasks as long as your iPhone is in Bluetooth range, even if it’s in the other room. It tracks your sleep, gathers detailed metrics about your workouts, and has a whole bunch of other useful hidden features like unlocking your Mac. As long as you know all the caveats before buying an Apple Watch, it’s full steam ahead to your local Apple Store to grab the latest Apple Watch Series 10. So the next question is: Which apps should you get?

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After spending hundreds of dollars on a watch, you’re probably not in the mood to spend even more for apps. After all, this is Apple we’re talking about, where iPhone users habitually pay seven times that of their Android counterparts. Fortunately, the Apple Watch App Store has a bunch of freebies that are just as good as paid alternatives. Check out these 11 free Apple Watch apps to make the most of your device.

Keeping up-to-date with your flight before you get to the airport involves either using your airline’s probably-terrible app or a sketchy free flight tracking website. Flighty will make you never touch those things again. It’s a one-stop shop to track everything concerning an upcoming flight: check-in times, boarding times, delays, gate changes — you name it. The app is reliable, easy to use, and the free version offers impressive functionality. Best of all, it has a great Apple Watch version.

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When your hands are full with your passport and boarding pass, hand carry, and suitcase, a quick flick of the wrist lets you check if your boarding is still on time — or whatever else. I’ve been using it for the past couple of flights, and it’s become one of my favorite Apple-only apps. As it gets closer to boarding time, Flighty appears as a live activity showing your flight number, seat, gate, and boarding/departure time. During your flight, it provides a countdown to arrival — great if it’s a smaller plane without in-flight entertainment screens.

Aside from this, Flighty sends you notifications for important things like gate changes. The notifications arrive just as fast as the official ones from the airline and, based on personal experience, are reliable and accurate. The free version of Flighty has no ads, supports unlimited flights, provides live data, and lets you link your flight with travel companions. The pro version ($3.99 a month or $249 for life) gives access to a treasure trove of extra information: predicted departure time, forecast on arrival, and watch complications. This app is so good it’s worth it even if you only fly once a year.

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For years, the statistic circulated that 75% of Americans suffer from chronic dehydration. Fortunately, that turned out to be false, but it is true that many people don’t drink enough water. If you find yourself only drinking once you have a headache, then you might want to try out Waterllama. It’s a simple app: It takes into account factors like your age, gender, weight, and activity level, then determines how much water you need to drink and when. You get a notification whenever it’s time to “top up,” and it takes into account the “hydration factor” of anything that isn’t strictly water, like juice and soda.

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The whole point is to gamify drinking water, complete with cutesy cartoon animals and streak trackers like you might find in Duolingo. For most people, the reminder part is all you need, and everything else is overkill. For those who want more, the pro version adds more characters, challenges, beverage types, and customization.

So what’s the benefit of an Apple Watch version compared to the existing iPhone and iPad versions? Probably that those water reminders go with you anywhere your phone does not. It might be preferable to get them as a wrist tap if you’d rather not interrupt your workflow by checking your phone.

Tip calculator apps are a dime a dozen, but they still suffer from the same problem: They’re not very discreet. You risk your server seeing you whip out your phone and decide their work was only worth about 15%. Tipsy lets you crunch the numbers from your wrist. Put in the total for your night on the town and then spin the crown to see different percentages. Thanks to its smart rounding, you’ll never have to dig for change. Best of all, it can split the bill — and the tip — between multiple people.

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Tipsy Pro costs $2.99, but it is a bit hard to justify even that small amount when the Apple Calculator on Apple Watch can also calculate tips. Just plug in the full amount of the bill and hit the tip button. Use the crown to control the percentage of the tip and add people to split the bill. The only major advantage Tipsy has here is extra theme customizations.

Still, we recommend Tipsy because it lays out the information in a clearer and more digestible format, and the app launches straight into a tip calculator. If you’re concerned about data collection, worry not, as the app collects none. In any case, there’s nothing to lose downloading it and keeping it on hand (pun intended) for the next time you eat out.

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While the Apple Watch calculator does have a built-in tip calculator, it doesn’t yet have a currency converter. That’s only on the iPhone calculator for the time being. Elk is a great choice for taking a quick glance at currency rates without touching your phone. For starters, it uses location data to determine which currency you want to convert from. Once you arrive at your vacation destination, there’ll be no need to scroll through a massive list of currencies to make sure you selected the right kind of pesos.

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Aside from that, it includes an Apple Watch-optimized control scheme. Use the crown to change the amount, and swipe left (or right) to increase (or decrease) the values by an order of ten. It tells you when the currency exchange rate was last updated so you know you’re getting accurate numbers. Thankfully, the free version only limits how many currencies you can look at at a time.

The Pro version costs $9.99 and gives you access to all currencies — pretty reasonable compared to the pricing structures of other apps of this kind. So if you find yourself constantly doing wrist conversions in multiple currencies, maybe throw the developers a couple of dollars. Elk really shines when you pair its watchOS version with the iOS version. On iPhone, you can see charts showing the currency change for increasing sums of money, plus a lock screen widget to see current rates at a glance.

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Constellation tracking apps have been around for almost as long as gyroscopes in smartphones. Night Sky brings it to your wrist. The Apple Watch version works the same as the others, using the gyroscope to point you towards celestial bodies. Calibration should be instant and automatic, requiring no setup. Just open the app and you’re good to go. The cool part is that it will identify and highlight specific constellations, adding an illustration to them for better reference. It’ll give you a narrated sky tour and dim the screen to red to avoid ruining visibility if you’d rather not interrupt a star party. Space travel mode with the crown lets you go back and forth in time to see celestial bodies as they move through the night sky over time.

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So who is this app for, specifically? Aside from the casual stargazer, this could be helpful to someone trying to orient their telescope. It frees up both hands so you’re not juggling your iPhone in one hand and the telescope in another. When your Apple Watch is face up, it automatically changes to a compass mode so you at least know the general direction you should be looking.

Paying $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year for Night Sky+ removes ads. It also gives you access to every star in the database, lets you see satellites, and helps find the Aurora Borealis. Download Night Sky now so it’s ready to go the next time you get to enjoy a starry sky.

The Apple Weather app is fine for most people, but it’s not without its faults. A common complaint for some people is the seeming lack of accuracy. It might tell you that it’s going to rain, but not precisely when and how much; basically, it’s not the best way to determine whether or not you should grab a jacket on your way out. CARROT attempts to be the last weather app you’ll ever need, and the reviews seem to agree that it pulls it off. It prides itself on having the most accurate weather data possible and making that data actually useful with its carefully designed UI.

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The biggest selling point, though, is how the CARROT bot automatically describes the weather. You can program it to be completely drab and professional, or you can turn the dial to max and have it curse up a storm (almost literally) when describing a major incoming weather event. So the fun isn’t just getting the weather, it’s the entertaining delivery that makes another day of overcast weather just a bit more bearable.

CARROT is free, but most of its features are locked behind its Premium Club membership for $4.99 a month or $19.99 a year. You’ll have to pay if you want weather notifications, maps, watch complications, and the ability to change which data sources it’s using. One reason you might be reticent to use a third-party weather app is that your personal data — particularly your location — might be shared or sold. As a little cherry on top, CARROT stakes its reputation on the fact that it does neither.

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Reddit is the social media platform for people who prefer long blocks of text and the ability to downvote anything they don’t like. It can be a wild place, full of hidden features and tech support, but unfortunately, Reddit doesn’t make a version for Apple Watch — though, to be fair, most major app developers don’t make watch versions either. Enter: Nano for Reddit.

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Nano won’t give you the full Reddit experience, but it does let you do everything that matters. Browse Reddit as you normally might, using the force touch to control sort settings, upvote and downvote, and even post comments. As one reviewer noted, it’s 95% of the Reddit experience on the smallest screen possible.

Full disclosure: The app hasn’t gotten any updates since 2022, which in most cases would suggest it’s been abandoned by developers and no longer in working order. Reddit changed the price of its API back in 2023 and killed off a wide swath of third-party apps in the process — which, in theory, should mean that Nano no longer works. According to regular users, though, it’s still fully operational. If you use Reddit, then download it so you’ve got something to cure your boredom in a pinch; user u/peterinjapan humorously says it’s an excellent way to browse Reddit while in a Japanese hot spring where phone use isn’t socially acceptable.

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Not long ago, not a soul was willing to touch Apple Maps, not even with a 32-and-a-half-foot pole. Its directions were atrocious, its UI glitchy, and it sometimes took you to an entirely different destination — sometimes even miles and miles away from where you were trying to go. That has changed, with the new Apple Maps being far more reliable for everything from a long-haul road trip to a daily commute. Especially with how well it’s baked into Apple apps, such as iMessage. Still, Google Maps continues to be the default for most people in terms of accuracy, up-to-date information, and usability. If you’re not yet sold on Apple Maps, then Google Maps for Apple Watch is still a bang-up choice.

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You’re getting the same excellent experience as you would get on an iPhone packed into a much smaller format. So even if your phone is in your pocket, you can get verbal turn-by-turn directions, estimated ETAs, and more. For commuters who are worried about pickpocketing on public transit, it makes for a great way to know when to get off the subway and change lines without taking your phone out of your bag. Best of all, it syncs flawlessly with your iPhone so you can see directions on both screens as needed.

Back-and-forth translation apps have been around for a while now. There are even earbuds that can translate languages in real time. Apple Watch is a bit behind in this regard, since Google Translate has yet to get a watchOS edition, and Apple’s in-house Translate app has, for years, maintained pretty low ratings on all devices. For reference, it’s sitting at 2.3 stars at the time of writing. Until Google Translate comes to Apple Watch or Apple gets its translation apps together, iTranslate Converse could be a great choice for bridging the gap between languages.

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The design is so simple there’s practically no need for any explanation. You hold down the button, speak, then release to get a translation. iTranslate boasts 38 languages, with the ability to automatically detect them — even in noisy environments. If you forgot what was said during an interlingual conversation, you can peruse the transcripts later. Just make sure to check the list of supported languages, since some only support text translation.

There are only two downsides that we can see: One, iTranslate requires an internet connection to work for the free version, so you’ll be stuck pantomiming for help if your foreign SIM card fails you way out in the boondocks. Two, most of the functionality of text translation is locked behind the Pro paywall. Regardless, it seems to be the best translation app available on the Apple Watch at the time of writing.

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Sleep tracking on the Apple Watch is one of the top reasons to buy one in the first place. It wakes you up in the morning with a gentle wrist vibration alarm, tells you exactly how long you slept and how often you woke up, and makes it easy to change your sleep schedule as needed. For most, that’s enough, but if you want to go a step further, then you might want to check out SleepWatch.

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The app doesn’t just aim to track your sleeping habits, it tries to figure out how to make your sleep better based on that information. It tracks things that Apple sleep cannot, like snoring and coughing, various nighttime disruptions that wake you, or heart rate dips. It helps you find a bedtime and wake-up time better suited to your circadian rhythm. Once it’s gathered enough data, it has a “scientifically-informed,” personalized AI coach that figures out how you can improve your shuteye. User reviews put it at 4.7 stars, so clearly it’s doing something right.

The premium version naturally includes more features. One is the “SleepWatch Score,” which compares your sleep quality to the rest of the world. Premium costs $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. All in all, the free version has quite a few features compared to other apps on this list.

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If you use a Kindle or Nook e-reader, then looking up a word in the dictionary is only a tap of the screen away. But if the whole e-reader thing isn’t your style, then you’re forced to either remember to look up a particular word later or interrupt your reading to check your smartphone. Neither option is ideal, especially if you’re easily distracted and looking to keep that reading time sacrosanct. LookUp might be a possible solution. It’s an Apple Watch dictionary that lets you quickly check the definition of something and get straight back to reading, studying, or whatever you intend to use it for. The app sources words from the Oxford English dictionary complete with example sentences and synonyms. As an extra little bonus, it can translate words into 20 additional languages.

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LookUp adds any words you look up to a personal vocabulary list, too. Later, once you’re done reading, you can test yourself on the words and be 100% sure they’re committed to memory. This makes the app great whether you’re a student who needs to know those words for your exams or just an avid reader who’d never pass up the chance to expand your vocab.

To get the full functionality besides the basic lookup and vocabulary builder, you’ll need to pay $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. There’s even a $59.99 lifetime subscription, if you really like it. The app is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac so you can keep that list of words with you wherever you go.