How to add and remove Glances on Apple Watch

The Apple Watch is finally in the wild, even if many pre-orders haven’t yet been fulfilled. One of the integral features of the Apple Watch are Glances, which are accessed by swiping up on the watch face and are designed to give you snippets of information without getting out your iPhone. But how do you add them? How do you remove them? What are the best Glances available? We’ve got everything you need to know.

You might also like to check out our Apple Watch Review.

How to add Glances on Apple Watch: What are Glances?

The easiest way to explain what Glances are is to compare them to Widgets in the Notification Centre on your iPhone or iPad. Much like widgets, the glance feature is designed to give you snippets of information that you can glance at and carry on with your day, without getting your iPhone out of your pocket. That’s one of the main purposes of the Apple Watch; spend less time interacting with your iPhone, and more time interacting with the world around you.

Glances can have a variety of functions, and they’re easily accessed – just swipe up from the bottom of the display on the watchface. Glances can include information about the weather, traffic updates for your journey home as well as a circular graph displaying calories burned, minutes of exercise completed and standing time. You can find out more about the fitness tracking capabilities of the Apple Watch here.

How to add Glances on Apple Watch

It’s a fairly easy process to add Glances to your Apple Watch. When initially setting up the Apple Watch, if you selected “Install all apps automatically” then any Apple Watch companion app that has an accompanying Glance will automatically be added to your Glances line-up.

However, if you opted to manually organise your Apple Watch companion apps, you’ll have to manually add the accompanying glance when you install the app on your Watch.

So, to install a Glance, you first need to open the Apple Watch app on your iPhone with your Apple Watch connected. Then, scroll down to the list of third party Apple Watch compatible apps, and install your chosen app. Once it has been installed, simply toggle “Show in Glances” to add it to your Glances and it’ll appear on your Apple Watch the next time Glances are accessed.

There’s another way of adding, and more importantly, organising your Apple Watch Glances. Simply open the Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone and tap on the Glances menu. From here, you can see a list of all the Glances already installed on your Apple Watch, as well as a list of Glances ready to install. To install a new Glance, simply tap the green + icon next to its name to add it to the list.

From here, you can also re-organise your collection of Glances so you don’t find yourself frantically swiping between your Glances, trying to find a specific one. This is achieved by tapping, holding and dragging the three-lined icon next to each Glance into an order that works for you, and will automatically be updated on your Apple Watch.

How to remove glances on Apple Watch

It’s just as easy to remove Glances from your Apple Watch. As before, simply access the Apple Watch companion app on your iPhone and tap on the Glances menu. From here, all you need to do is tap the red ‘-‘ icon next to the Glance that you’d like to remove and then tap “Remove” to complete the process.

Alternatively, you can scroll down the main menu to access the list of third party apps that are compatible with the Apple Watch, select the app whose glance you’d like to remove and deselect “Show in Glances”.

How to add Glances on Apple Watch: Do all Apple Watch companion apps come with Glances?

Although it may seem that every Apple Watch companion app comes with a Glance, that’s not the case. There’s no requirement for developers to add a Glance to the Apple Watch companion app, and for certain apps it just wouldn’t make any sense – the Apple Store and Camera Plus apps are good examples of this.

How to add Glances on Apple Watch: Best Glances for Apple Watch

So, lets talk about the best Glances for the Apple Watch, starting with the Activity Glance. The Apple Watch uses a host of sensors to track your health and fitness, and is displayed in an easy-to-digest way in the Activity app. The accompanying Activity Glance displays a circular graph with three distinctive rings – red represents calories burned, green represents minutes of exercise completed and blue represents standing time.

Every time you access the Activity Glance, the rings animate and quickly fill up to represent how close you are to your targets for the day. It’s particularly good at motivating you when you open the Glance and see that you’ve almost hit your target and your circle is nearly full, which prompts you to get out of your chair and take a walk (in our personal experience anyway).

Another simple yet effective Glance is the Weather Glance. We’ve shied away from using the stock Weather app on our iPhones in the past, as there are many third party options that are better ( Carrot Weather to name just one) but the Weather app for the Apple Watch is a joy to use. Apart from the main Weather app having a beautiful watch face styled 12 hour forecast, the Glance balances simplicity and information with a near perfect balance.

CityMapper provides you with travel instructions in a number of cities around the world, and is a favourite of ours. We were happy when the company announced Apple Watch support, complete with a Glance. The CityMapper Glance displays any disruptions to the public transport network – in London, it notifies you of any issues on the tube, but this may vary from city to city.

When Twitter announced support for the Apple Watch, we assumed that we’d be able to view recent tweets and notifications, and while the former is true, the latter isn’t. That’s where Twitterrific comes in, with an Apple Watch companion app that’s mainly focused around your Twitter notifications/activity. The Twitterrific Glance gives you an easy way to see your recent Twitter activity, displaying the number of favourites, retweets and followers you’ve received in the last 24 hours.

For more, visit our complete guide to Apple Watch.

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Author: Lewis Painter, Senior Staff Writer

Lewis Painter is a Senior Staff Writer at Tech Advisor. Our resident Apple expert, Lewis covers everything from iPhone to AirPods, plus a range of smartphones, tablets, laptops and gaming hardware. You'll also find him on the Tech Advisor YouTube channel.