View and Control Your Apple Watch From Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can mirror and control your Apple Watch from your iPhone.

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So a great new feature of iOS 16 and Apple Watch OS 9 is the ability to see your Apple Watch screen on your iPhone. Not only that but you can control it from there as well. Now before you try this make sure you meet the requirements. First, you must be using an Apple Watch series 6 or newer. The Apple Watch must be using the new watchOS 9 operating system and your iPhone should be using iOS 16 or newer. I'll have some more trouble shooting tips at the end.

The idea here is you're going to want to see your Apple Watch screen on your iPhone. To do that it's a new feature in the Settings App. You would think you would go to the watch app to get to this. But in fact you go to Settings. In Settings you're going to want to go down to Accessibility. It's an option here under Physical and Motor. Look for Apple Watch Mirroring. Now strangely it is a switch. Actually to get this to turn on you need to turn the switch On and then it activates right here on the screen. It's kind of odd that it is a switch. I wouldn't be surprised if the screen changes in future versions of iOS. 

So I'm going to turn it On here and it is going to connect to my watch. So this is the watch that is already connected to this iPhone. It is what syncs information between it and all of that. Now you can see here exactly what is on the screen of the watch. The watch is going to have this blue rectangle around it to indicate that it is being shown on your iPhone as well. Now you can control this using your watch, just like before. Anything that you do here on your watch will be reflected on the screen you see on your iPhone. But you can also control this using your iPhone. 

So you can just touch the crown here and drag down or drag up like you are manipulating the physical thing. There is the side button as well. Just a quick tap on the side button there on the screen and it is acting just like you're pressing it here. Then you can scroll up and down with your finger to manipulate what's on the screen. Tap on an app to go into it. It all works just as you would expect. So control your watch from your iPhone screen or from the watch itself. Either way it works. 

Now this is in Accessibility. The reason it is here is to give you a larger screen if this screen is sometimes too small for you. Maybe for changing things. Getting into Settings. Manipulating some apps it is easier to do it seeing a larger screen on your iPhone. But this also gives us the ability, as you can see here in this tutorial, to record the Apple Watch screen. Previously we could just take screenshots, just still images of what is going on on the Apple Watch. But now with mirroring it to the iPhone you could record the iPhone screen using iPhone Screen Recording or recording software like I'm using and actually get a recording. So perhaps I can finally start doing some decent Apple Watch tutorials in the future. 

Now this can be used for customizing your Apple Watch using a bigger screen. But remember that you also have the Watch App. You could use the Watch App for things like say Editing your watch faces, changing colors, complications, and all of that. But even here the watch faces appear pretty small right here. Using Apple Watch mirroring may actually be a better option. For instance here if I were to go and try to customize this face here I would go to Edit and you could see it is a little bit bigger than what I was looking at in the watch app. 

Now some more troubleshooting tips. Make sure you've got an Apple Watch Series 6 or newer. Make sure operating systems are up-to-date. If it is still not working, like the screen comes up but it is just a spinning wheel in the middle and it never connects to the Apple Watch, make sure your Apple Watch, of course, is On. Make sure it is Unlocked. If you need to try restarting. Shutting down and starting up your Apple Watch again. If that doesn't work you want to do the same for your iPhone. But in my experience if it doesn't work just simply restarting the Apple Watch will actually get it to work. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.