watchOS 26.6 Beta 1 is OUT! 🔥 First Look!

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:06]What is going on guys? Welcome back to the channel. Okay, so kind of a surprise. We're not quite in June yet, but Apple did just indeed drop Watch OS 26.6 beta 1. And you can see for the first beta, we have a build number of 23U5025E.

[00:00:25]The E does signify that Apple feels pretty strongly about this build. We're close to the beginning of the alphabet still, so I would not anticipate a ton of betas being needed for this to go out. And also keep in mind since we are less than 2 weeks away from WWDC at this point, coming on June 8th, this beta 26.6 will run in parallel with iOS, Watch OS, iPad OS, and all that 27 that will be dropping on the 8th as well. So, we're in for a lot of fun new betas from Apple, but keep in mind, new features will be reserved for iOS 27 at that point. So, we're not expecting anything new here. There could be a Watch OS 26.5.1 update in between. They could also just roll it out in iOS 26.6, but just something I wanted to let you guys know of. Get ready. Buckle in. We have a lot of excitement coming for Watch OS.

[00:01:22]But first things first, as you can see, obviously also in 26.6, we do not have any new smarter Siri here. Nothing really new for Apple Intelligence to Apple Watch. Again, I do feel like we will get something in iOS 27 for that.

[00:01:37]Same with gesture control. It is still as minimal as it's been for doubletapping ever since it was kind of announced. There are not a ton of new features here. Jumping into the watch itself to see how it's going to perform.

[00:01:49]Let's go to the activity app.

[00:01:53]Took just a second to load. Let's scroll. Had a little glitchy animation on the top there. I'm not sure if you guys saw it, but it's not looking bad. That loaded up pretty well. Scroll for our workouts.

[00:02:06]Let's go into our apps. Let's go back into settings.

[00:02:11]Scroll down a little bit. Let's go to battery.

[00:02:16]Let's check our battery health.

[00:02:19]And you can see we still actually are at 100% max capacity on our Ultra 3.

[00:02:26]Everything is working pretty pretty well, guys. I'm definitely happy to see that. Let's go into the music app.

[00:02:32]Yeah. So, as you can see, it is opening and closing apps pretty quickly.

[00:02:35]Scrolling is easy and intuitive as expected. I will say the back of the watch is getting a little warm from reindexing everything, but that is not a surprise at all. If we go into the stocks app here, the animations, yep, it's working pretty well pretty quickly.

[00:02:53]So, I would again assume this is all going to be background bug fix, security improvements, and battery life fixes as well. Not too much else to look forward to here. There have been a lot of rumors talking about what new features for Apple Health and features in general could be coming in watch OS 27. If you want to hear about that, if you want me to make a video on it, leave a comment down below. let me know and I will work on that as well. But obviously, no surprise, we do not have any new watch faces here. Ever since that Pride Luminance was added from the last update, everything else is still exactly the same. So, no major rush to update to this unless you were having battery life issues or performance issues and you're a developer. I would anticipate the public beta to go out uh for iOS here in the next couple of days, probably I'd say 48 hours or so. That's usually what Apple's been doing. And you'll be able to test that out as well. But again, if you didn't see our iOS 26.6 beta 1 video, it's more of the same. Not too much really going on. But that's it for this one, guys. I know I've talked a lot in my other videos about how stale Watch OS has been. Hopefully, we'll see a huge improvement in less than two weeks time to motivate Apple to give us more features and function and improvements over these iterative changes. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you in the next one. Peace.