5 excellent free Apple Watch apps every owner should know about

So you’ve just strapped on a new Apple Watch, paired it with your iPhone and opened up the App Store to fill it up with cool software. Plenty of what you’ll find there says it’s free, and most of it is — right up until you try to use the component that runs on your wrist. The App Store explains that apps marked with Get instead of a price tag can still come with in-app purchases, and that’s often where the paywall is with watch apps.

Let’s take Spotify as an example. Its free tier will refuse to play anything from the watch at all, allowing those on the free tier to only control music playing on another device. Meanwhile, Pocket Casts (a cross-platform podcast player) locks standalone watch playback behind its $39.99/year Plus Plan. Fitness apps commonly do this, too, with hiking route planner Footpath putting its watch features behind a paid tier, and Komoot forcing new users to pay for Premium before they can send a route to a device.

In response, we’ve put together a short list of great apps where the main Apple Watch functionality is completely free to use. All five of these apps run on watchOS 27 (which Apple released in September 2026 along with iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate and other major OS updates). They work on the Apple Watch Series 9, Ultra 2, SE 3 and anything newer.

If you’re obsessed with tracking your steps, there’s no better free-to-use app than Pedometer++. It’s made and maintained by indie dev David Smith, who redesigned the entire watch app for version 8 back in April. Access to its core features is completely free, including a running step count, complications for your watch face, and the option to start and track indoor or outdoor walks, runs and hikes from your wrist. This all syncs with Apple Health.

There’s a Premium option (and it truly is optional), which will set you back $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year. For that, you get maps on the watch, offline maps for workouts, Live Activities on your iPhone’s lock screen and something called Expedition Mode, which cuts back on constant heart rate tracking to stretch battery life by up to 40 percent, according to Smith. While you don’t need Premium to count steps or log a walk, the free version does show ads.

Nike Run Club doesn’t have any paid tiers or in-app purchases at all; the watch app has been able to track a run without your phone since 2019. It puts Nike’s audio-coached Guided Runs, always-on stats, live pace charts and streak badges on your wrist, along with a Nike watch face that moves with you. If you’ve got a cellular Apple Watch, a 2026 update also lets you share your live location during a run.

Strava doesn’t charge you to record and share activities either. Its watch app will log a run without your phone, show saved routes with off-route alerts and give you three complications to choose from. That said, the Live Segments feature it added last year keeps personal record comparisons for subscribers, who pay $79.99 a year. Apple’s own Workout app is free, of course, but Fitness+ costs $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. 

So if you want a coached running app that won’t ask you for money at any point, Nike Run Club is the one to get.

You’re probably aware that Whoop’s bands come with a (virtually) mandatory subscription, the cheapest of which is currently $199 per year. Bevel is Apple Watch’s answer to Whoop that takes the data your watch is already collecting and turns it into the same kind of daily recovery, sleep, strain and stress scores you’d get with the screenless wearable, all for free. On top of that, with Bevel, you also get nutrition tracking, strength training logs, cycle tracking, and journal along with the Apple Watch app, widgets and complications.

It was only fairly recently that Bevel made most of that free, back in December 2025. Bevel Pro is still around and adds an AI health coach, health records, a biological age estimate and training plans for $14.99 per month, or $99.99 per year. However, on the Apple Watch itself, the App Store listing for Bevel only talks about strength workouts, which sync between your wrist and your phone. The scores are built from heart rate, HRV and sleep data your watch collects in the background.

If you use Spotify or Pocket Casts and want to play your podcasts from your watch, you’ll have to pay to do so. But there’s a free alternative: Overcast. Its App Store listing promises standalone playback and cellular streaming on the watch, while its core app is free and supported by non-intrusive ads for other shows (with an optional subscription to get rid of them). With Overcast, you can download podcasts ahead of time and play them on the go, even if you’ve left your phone behind. It’s a basic app done very well.

Unlike most large podcast apps, Overcast is maintained by a single developer. In fact, the dev rewrote the watch app from scratch last year to make it faster and more reliable. A slew of updates have been added since then, including Double Tap for play and pause, Smart Speed, and Voice Boost to download episodes. Smart Speed works by trimming silences out of episodes, while Voice Boost evens out quiet voices so podcasts on your wrist now sound the same as they would on your phone.

However, it’s worth noting that streaming over cellular will eat into your battery. The Apple Watch uses the least amount of power when it’s connected to your phone via Bluetooth, while Wi-Fi connections use less power than cellular. Weak signals also drain the battery faster, as does playing audio through the watch’s speaker rather than a pair of headphones. In other words, when using Overcast from your wrist, download shows first and listen via AirPods for best results.

I used Overcast to play the latest episode of The Common Descent Podcast by David Moscato and Will Harris while walking my dog, streamed via cellular on my Watch Ultra 3 and connected my AirPods Max 2. I have zero issues to report from that experience. 

Shazam needs no introduction as the beloved music ID utility. If you’ve noticed that it disappeared from your watch, you’ll now find it as a separate, watch-only app called Shazam Music Recognition. Apple develops it, it’s free with no in-app purchases and needs watchOS 11 or later. Shazam’s history also syncs with iCloud, so anything you tag on your watch will show up in the app on your iPhone.

It’s super easy to use Shazam on the Apple Watch. Just tap the button in the app or set up a complication on your watch face, then opening the app will tell you whatever’s playing and save it to your history. From there, you can preview the track or add it to your library if you subscribe to Apple Music. There’s a Smart Stack widget too, or you can just ask Siri what song is playing and it’ll fire up the app. On an Ultra, you can go one better and assign Recognize Music to the Action button under Settings > Action Button, so you’re only ever one press away from finding out what song’s playing.

You can install all five of these apps from the App Store on the watch itself, or via the Watch app on your iPhone under My Watch > Available Apps. Before you download anything, though, check what the watch app does without a subscription, since developer support pages will usually give more information than the App Store. And to squeeze more out of what’s already on your wrist, there are plenty of underrated Apple Watch features you can set up in minutes.