An upcoming change could let Wear OS devices play nice with iOS

The Apple Watch is a pretty good smartwatch, offering the most complete experience you’ll get when paired with an Apple product. But not everyone wants the same things, which is why other smartwatch brands exist. And while it’s pretty painless to choose the watch that suits your needs, it’s not so easy to get it working with Apple devices.

This is a restriction that has long existed and has been a huge pain point for most people looking to explore outside of Apple’s ecosystem. However, it looks like things could be changing, as the latest iOS 26.1 beta offers hints that Apple could be looking to better accommodate third-party devices.

Wear OS devices for all

The news comes Macworld, shedding light on some of the code featured in the latest beta of iOS, which has a new unreleased feature called Notification Forwarding. According to the news outlet, this feature will provide users with the option to show notifications on third-party devices. While this looks promising, it does have limitations.

Apparently, when this feature is enabled, users will only be able to forward notifications to just one accessory. Furthermore, when this option is enabled, it will completely disable notifications on the paired Apple Watch. It’s a pretty big trade off, but one that might be necessary for some. Naturally, this isn’t live yet, so it’s unclear if it’s something that will arrive in a public release.

But it does appear that Apple is building a support system to allow this type of functionality in the future. The article from Macworld even speculates that this functionality might be exclusive to the EU market, due to its more stringent Digital Markets Act (DMA) that ensures fair business practices.

For those that have been looking forward to being able to use third-party products properly with iOS, the time might almost be here. And while the potential is exciting, Macworld shares that it doesn’t expect this feature to arrive with iOS 26.1. But we could see it arrive sometime in the future.