One of the best new features of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 is the ability to control key functions with a new “double-tap” gesture. It lets you answer calls, control music playback, reply to messages, etc., simply by tapping your thumb and index finger twice.
But you don’t need to buy one of these new watches to try out this gesture. In fact, a similar double-tap gesture has been available on watchOS for some time now.
How to try double tap on older Apple Watch models
Like many other good features, this one is buried within Accessibility settings on your Apple Watch. As long as you have an Apple Watch Series 4 or newer, you can try it out. To start, go to the Watch app on your iPhone, navigate to Accessibility, then enable AssistiveTouch. Here, tap Hand Gestures and enable it on the next page.
Next, select each of the gestures on the same page, which are Pinch, Double Pinch, Clench, and Double Clench, and map them to any action that you like. You have options such as opening Control Center, activating Siri, scrolling, running shortcuts, and many more.
Once you’ve done this, you can try all these gestures to see if they work for you, or you can just focus all your efforts on mapping your most-used action to Double Pinch, and replicate the experience of a Series 9 or Ultra 2.
Do I even need a new Apple Watch?
There’s a very good chance that Apple has polished double tap for the Series 9 and Ultra 2, and that using it on the new watch could be a far better experience than trying it via Accessibility settings on your old one. Plus, you won’t have to fiddle with any settings, as it will be enabled by default. Based on the promo videos we’ve seen for the new watch, it looks like double tap activates seamlessly and works well.
Having used the Accessibility gesture on an Apple Watch SE, it’s easy to tell the feature is not as reliable as you’d like it to be. When you can’t be sure if a gesture will work reliably every single time, you’re far less likely to use it regularly. With the Series 9 and Ultra 2, Apple may have fixed this problem, and for some people, that alone could be a reason enough to upgrade.