How to Keep the Apple Watch Display On Longer

The Apple Watch display defaults to staying on and active for 15 seconds when the screen is tapped or activated, but with new versions of WatchOS you can choose to keep the Apple Watch screen on for considerably longer before it dims itself again. This is helpful for many situations, whether you just want to observe the screen longer when you’re wearing watch, for demonstration purposes, and also when the Watch is placed into Nightstand Mode.

How to Change How Long the Apple Watch Display Stays On For

Maintaining a longer display wake time on Apple Watch is an easy setting change, but you’ll need at least WatchOS 2 or later to be installed before you will find the option in the settings. If you don’t find the option in Settings, you’ll need to update WatchOS first.

1. Open the Watch app on the paired iPhone and go to “My Watch” settings
2. Go to “General” then go to “Wake Screen”
3. Locate the ‘On Tap’ section of Wake Screen settings and select “Wake for 70 Seconds” (or if you want to shorten it, choose “Wake for 15 Seconds”, the default)
4. Exit out of Settings

The change is immediate and you can tap on the Watch screen to verify that the display will now stay active for considerably longer when it is tapped to activate.

You can always change this back to the default of 15 Seconds by returning to the Wake Screen settings and selecting that option.

While this is obviously useful, perhaps the biggest downside to making this Wake Screen adjustment is that you may notice lessened battery life due to the Apple Watch display being lit up for longer. For this reason, the longer display wake time may be most appropriate when it’s connected to the power charger, whether it’s in use as a nightstand clock or for demonstration purposes, or maybe you just don’t mind the potential hit to battery life.

Hopefully in future versions of WatchOS we’ll have more options, since 15 seconds and 70 seconds are a bit far apart, and it’d be nice to have options in the middle, say for 20 and 30 seconds, and perhaps even longer too, for a few minutes.