How to close apps on watchOS 27

I did technical support for 35 years. Its not a “jargon” issue. It’s a bit of a nonsense issue. You don’t need to “close apps” on the watch. And you don’t need to shut down GPS. Without GPS, the watch doesn’t function. You need to understand that the battery is going to drain, no matter what. Recharge it when needed. Its not “technical jargon”, its how this technology works.

As previously suggested, you can offer Apple feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

I thought in 27.0.1, you drag up from the bottom, like on the iPhone, and can see and terminate apps that way.

Note: this is what I read, as I am still on 26.7.1

Ejappleq wrote:

So activated GPS tracking is expensive. You can get a fix on a plane window seat with unconnected iPhone, but this takes a minute of intensive DSP processing.

Not sure this is actually happening or using up battery as I fly all the time on long trips and do not see this battery drain. The watch is on during the flights, although in Airplane Mode (which does not turn off GPS).

You can turn off GPS through Location Services.

Manage Location Services settings - Apple Support

Accidentally leave your walking workout active on your watch all day, and you’ll see this drain battery.

Which is expected. Simple solution to that -- end your workout. You can tell Siri, "Siri, end workout."

watchOS 26 at least allowed forced close on these. Do I need to hard reset?

Something else may be happening with your watch. I can spend hours inside buildings where no GPS signals are detectable on my watch nor on my iPhone and my watch does not run down.

Kilgore-Trout wrote:

I did technical support for 35 years. Its not a “jargon” issue. It’s a bit of a nonsense issue. You don’t need to “close apps” on the watch. And you don’t need to shut down GPS. Without GPS, the watch doesn’t function. You need to understand that the battery is going to drain, no matter what. Recharge it when needed. Its not “technical jargon”, its how this technology works.

As previously suggested, you can offer Apple feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

I agree with Kilgore-Trout, and I have never seen anyone "close apps" on a watch! I did not even know you could do that before reading this. People like me just wear their watches all day, some days with multiple workouts (yesterday I did outdoors walk and outdoors bicycling workouts), GPS is on all the time, it is on all night for sleep tracking, and for my Series 11, I recharge it just for a short time while I am in the shower and that's all it needs to become fully charged again for the next day.

"You can get a fix on a plane window seat with unconnected iPhone, but this takes a minute of intensive DSP processing."

That's not "hard to understand engineering jargon." It's actually incorrect jargon. (And I have 43 years of engineering experience, much of it developing GPS positioning algorithms and software for military uses, cell phone manufacturers, and space borne applications). First, getting a GPS fix does NOT require a minute of intensive DSP (digital signal processing); most of the "work" is simply acquiring at least 4 GPS signals (which usually takes ~ seconds with the commercial chips and antennas in these small devices), the position fix itself is akin to trilateration which involves very simple and very fast arithmetic, not using up much battery at all. And once the position fix is determined, subsequent position fixes are much faster and easier because they bootstrap from the previous one.

Yeah, I still don’t know what you are talking about. Two suggestions:

1. Post in your native language.
2. Stop pretending you know what is going on with the watch, and simply state the problem you are trying to solve.

we can't

these forums are user helping other users like yourself, it's sort of going to a physical apple store and asking other customers their advice

This is a user helping users with tech questions forum, we are not apple and apple do not read your posts here

You can provide them with feedback using Product Feedback - Apple

From another forum:

The Digital Crown double-press gesture has been reserved for Apple's upcoming Live Rewind AI feature… so it no longer brings up the App Switcher screen.

Fortunately, this doesn't mean the App Switcher is no longer available – only that the gesture for opening it has changed.

If you have watchOS 27.2 installed on your Apple Watch, you can access the App Switcher by pressing and holding the bottom of the screen while you're in an app.

From there, you can cycle through your recently used apps and quickly open them. You can also swipe left on a misbehaving app and tap the X to force quit it.

With 27.2, open an app (e.g., Workout), then tap the screen near the bottom edge; this will bring up all the apps running in the background, allowing you to close them completely using the old method. :-)

You can’t. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

I suggest you tell them using

Product Feedback - Apple