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5 excellent free Apple Watch apps every owner should know about
Plenty of watch apps are free to download and then put all wrist-related features behind a paywall. These ones don’t.
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.