Apple removing Time Travel feature in upcoming watchOS 5

Apple is removing yet another Apple Watch feature when watchOS 5, the next version of the smartwatch’s operating system, arrives this fall.

The next feature to be cut from the operating system: Time Travel. What the hell is Time Travel, you ask? Exactly.

Apple introduced Time Travel in watchOS 2 as a way for users to quickly see past and future events.

With a turn of the Apple Watch’s Digital Crown, you were able to see things like the weather forecast on a per hour basis and upcoming calendar events.

Time Travel seemed like a cool way to digest a lot of information at a glance, but a few things spelled its inevitable death.

Not only is the feature limited to a select handful of watch faces like “Solar” and “Astronomy,” but few developers took advantage of the feature for their own apps. (Few developers are even making Apple Watch apps, and the ones that did are removing them, but that’s a different story.)

Time Travel is mostly a flashy-looking feature that most Apple Watch owners would agree is useless. Like, how many people actually care to see how the Earth rotates throughout the day on a watch face? I can’t imagine anyone except a very small group of people who’d think spinning the Digital Crown to see such an animation is useful.

Removing Time Travel shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, and its removal likely won’t be missed by any Watch evangelists. Since watchOS 3, Apple has taken what I consider to be the correct steps to remove many poorly-designed software features to focus the smartwatch on health and fitness.

Now that the Apple Watch is three years old, it’s more important than ever for Apple to clearly define and double-down on the smartwatch’s key features (notifications and health and fitness-tracking) and dump all the extra fluff that nobody’s using. In other words: Focus on features that are less gloss and more utility, please.