Tactile notifications on your Apple Watch
The Apple Watch taps you on your wrist with every incoming notification. If your Apple Watch is on silent, you will still know that a notification is coming in, without a sound being played. Others are not bothered by it. Handy, but sometimes the Apple Watch doesn’t tap your arm hard enough and you still miss a notification. Fortunately, you can adjust the ‘tapping force’ of an Apple Watch to your own preference. In this tip you can read how to make the Apple Watch vibrate harder.
- Taptic Engine and Vibration
- Prominent shaking
- Set up on Apple Watch
Taptic Engine provides vibrations
The Apple Watch uses the Taptic Engine to tap your wrist. This is in fact a vibration motor, which emits a very short vibration. This makes you feel as if you are being touched briefly. A tap from the Taptic Engine therefore feels different than, for example, a vibration from your iPhone.
Set prominent vibrations
This is how you make the Apple Watch vibrate harder:
- Open the Settings app on your Apple Watch.
- Tap Hear and feel.
- Scroll to Tactile notifications. This is enabled by default.
- Choose Prominent.
Set up tactile notifications via Watch app
You can also change this setting in the Watch app on your iPhone. To do this, follow the same steps as described above, but instead of the settings on your Apple Watch itself, open the Apple Watch app.
- Open the Watch app on iPhone.
- Go to Hearing and feeling.
- Check the box next to Prominent.
Make sure your Apple Watch is set to receive taps from the Taptic Engine. Is your Apple Watch or iPhone on Do Not Disturb or another focus mode? Then you may not feel the watch when a message is received. You can turn off focus mode in Control Center on your Apple Watch or your iPhone. Your Apple Watch will then vibrate (harder) again.
Please note that with this setting you will no longer notice a difference in the vibration between an iMessage message and other notifications. All notifications feel equally prominent and with the same pattern.
Do you want to stop getting vibrations from your Apple Watch altogether? Then simply turn off the switch for Tactile notifications.
Want to know more about notifications on your Apple Watch? Then check out our tip! Here you can read everything about enabling, disabling notifications and more.
You can also have your Apple Watch tap your wrist every hour. This function is called tangible time and you can read how it works in the tip below.
