How to Use the New Compass App on Apple Watch

WithwatchOS 9, Apple has added a lot of new stuff to the Apple Watch. There’s a newLow Power Mode to extend battery life, an improvedsleep tracking feature in watchOS, and a powerful new compass app. So, if you’re going on a hike or exploring the road less travelled, you should know that the new compass app can do a lot to help you find your way and even re-trace your steps. If that sounds interesting to you, read on as we take a look at how to use the new compass app on Apple Watch.

Learn to Use the watchOS 9 Compass App

The new compass app in watchOS 9 enables a lot of useful features. You can obviously do the basics like finding your bearing, elevation, and co-ordinates; however, you can also do more, by adding waypoints, or recording your steps to retrace them later. We’ll be taking a look at all of these things in this article. As always, you can use the table of contents to navigate to any section that you want to learn more about.

Check Bearings, Elevation, Incline, and Co-ordinates

The new compass app shows a lot more information, including things like your bearing (which was also available in the old app), elevation, incline, and even your current co-ordinates. Checking all this information is pretty easy as well.

Simply open the Compass app on your Apple Watch and you will be able to see information such as the heading that you’re facing. If you rotate the Digital Crown, you will be able to see additional information such as the elevation, incline, and even the co-ordinates (latitude and longitude) of your location.

Alternatively, you can tap on the menu icon on the top-left. Here you will be able to see the elevation, incline, and other information.

Here’s what you need to do in order to add a new bearing in the compass app.

The compass app in watchOS 9 supports some really cool complications for yourfavourite Apple Watch facesas well. So if you want to, you can easily add the elevation information right on your watch screen. Here’s how:

Note:You can also choose complications for incline, among othercompass complications.

Waypoints in watchOS 9

One of the coolest new features in the compass app is the ability to create waypoints. Waypoints are a great way to navigate outdoors, if you’re hiking, or exploring off the beaten path. With waypoints, your Apple Watch will remember the co-ordinates to a location, and you can navigate back to it using the compass app. Here’s how you can create waypoints in the Compass app on watchOS 9.

The cool thing about waypoints is that you can even add them to your Apple Watch’s face as a complication to have easy access to them whenever you might need them. Here’s how to do that.

Record and Retrace Steps

If you’re hiking, or in a place where you want to ensure you can retrace your steps back to your starting point, the new Record and Retrace Steps feature in watchOS 9 is going to be a godsent for you. Here’s how to record and retrace steps with Apple Watch.

Check out the New and Improved Apple Watch Compass

Well that’s pretty much everything you can do with the new Compass app in watchOS 9. As you can see, there’s a lot that the app can do now. It can retrace your steps, record waypoints for easier explorations in the unknown, and of course, it can show you your elevation, bearing, incline, and more information. Plus, you can now add Compass complications to get important information at a glance. So, what do you think of the new compass app in watchOS 9? Let us know in the comments.

Akshay Gangwar

Greetings, tech titans and fellow literary time-travelers! I’m Akshay, your tech-whisperer and Harry Potter’s number one stalker – seriously, don’t ask me how many times I’ve read those books; it’s borderline unhealthy.

Working in the tech journalism industry since 2016, I have 7 years of experience covering everything from technology news, to well-researched resource articles. Now the Content Strategist at Beebom, I often pen down op-eds for our website, sharing expert commentary on the latest in technology, AI, and electric cars.

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