In future Apple Watch product planning, Apple will focus more on battery life and health sensor upgrades, rather than introducing biometric unlocking methods such as fingerprint recognition to the watch. According to reports, Apple is still satisfied with the unlocking experience by pairing the iPhone and has no urgent plans to add Touch ID to the watch.
The whistleblower, Setsuna Digital, posted on the social platform Weibo, refuting recent rumors that Apple Watch will soon support biometric unlocking, stating that Apple continues to prioritize improving battery capacity and health monitoring capabilities on its wearable device roadmap. He pointed out that if a Touch ID sensor is added to the fuselage, it will not only increase the cost of the whole machine, but also further squeeze the limited internal space, thus affecting the battery size. This trade-off is currently not in line with Apple's product positioning of Apple Watch.
Previously, in August last year, a developer discovered a string suspected to be related to Touch ID in the system code. The outside world once speculated that Apple might try to add a fingerprint recognition function to the Apple Watch Series 12 or Apple Watch Ultra 4, including an under-screen fingerprint or integrated into the side buttons, similar to the solutions on the iPad mini and iPad Air. However, judging from the current revelations, this idea has not become Apple’s mainstream option at least in the short term. The relevant code is more like pre-research or reservation, rather than a functional signal that is about to be implemented.
Judging from the pace of industrial design, sources say that the 2026 Apple Watch is not expected to see significant appearance changes, and the overall design update may not undergo major adjustments until 2028 at the earliest. By then, Apple is believed to have the opportunity to introduce cutting-edge health technologies such as non-invasive blood glucose monitoring into its new generation of products. However, this technology is still in the early stages of research and development and is still far from being commercially available.
In the context where battery life and health capabilities are still the core competitiveness of wearable devices, Apple seems to have chosen to temporarily shelve the productization of "icing on the cake" functions such as Touch ID, and prioritize limited space and resources into larger batteries and more health sensors. For users, this means that future generations of Apple Watch are more likely to bring actual experience improvements in terms of wearing time and health monitoring depth, rather than disruptive changes in unlocking methods.