This Popular App Brings a Missing Feature to Your Apple Watch

Apple just named it as one of the most downloaded apps of the year.

Published December 18, 2024

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Updated December 18, 2024

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This week, Apple revealed its year-end list of the most downloaded iPhone apps in 2024. It includes both free and paid apps, the latter of which is more interesting because it does not include bog-standard social media or streaming apps.

And while a bunch of interesting apps made the list — for things like productivity, wellness, photography, art and exploration — one stood out to me. It’s an iPhone app that brings a neat ability to your Apple Watch.

The ability to browse the web.

µBrowser: Watch Web Browser

Wrist web browsing

Apple notoriously doesn’t have a Safari app for the Apple Watch, and there’s no Google web browsing app, either. However, there are third-party apps for the Apple Watch that allow you to browse the web. I just didn’t think they were that popular, given that using your Apple Watch’s tiny screen to navigate the web isn’t a great experience.

Evidently, I was wrong, as µBrowser — an iPhone and Apple Watch app that lets you browse the web right from your wrist — made the list for one of the most downloaded iPhone apps of the year.

Not quite a game-changer

The app is quite simple. When you open the µBrowser app on your Apple Watch, you can type a website or search for something (it uses DuckDuckGo). You can click a pre-set bookmark, which you can curate and customize using the µBrowser iPhone app.

You can add µBrowser as a complication to a watch face or add it to your Smart Stack, giving you even quicker access to the web browser.

That said, as you probably surmised, using µBrowser is far from a great experience. The internet runs very slow, pages often don’t load and log-ins rarely work — so don’t expect a workaround for Instagram or Twitter (which don’t have Apple Watch apps).

Also, there isn’t even a Back button, so page navigation can be tedious at best.

Price and availability

The app costs $2 and, to me, seems like a difficult sell.

But if you want to search the web or quickly access bookmarked sites from your Apple Watch — and given that it made Apple’s most downloaded apps list, many people do — then µBrowser can do those things (sometimes).