Five years ago I wrote a post entitled 38,299 hours on my wrist, where to observed the five year anniversary of the launch of the Apple Watch. I took a look at how often I have worn one since it’s release. Yesterday, the Apple Watch celebrated its ten year anniversary so I thought I’d update the counts.
In the ten years since the Apple Watch was released I have worn one for at least part of 78,537 hours. My method for measuring this is to to search HealthKit for the existence of a heart rate sample during each hour. This isn’t a perfect method but should be very close proxy to the times when it was on my wrist, as the watch generally records a heart rate reading at least once per hour.
That equates to my wearing an Apple Watch on 97.1% of possible days.
Since August 2015 when I had the idea for Sleep++ (long before the watch got official sleep tracking support), I have worn the watch all day (& night) in 77% of those days. More dramatically, in the last three years I’ve only had two days when I didn’t wear it at all.
The Apple Watch has become an essential part of my life and lifestyle. Wearing it has helped to be healtier and more active. It has been my companion on countless adventures and helped me navigate while hiking in my favorite places.
Developing apps for it has been my favorite part of my job over this period. I really enjoy working on this platform and the possibilities it allows. I am very grateful for the role it has played in my life these ten years and look forward to continuing to wear it for years to come.
PS. I’m a bit infamous for wearing multiple Apple Watches at a time (typically all summer while I’m concurrently working on the new beta watchOS with the current stable release). For the purposes of this analysis I didn’t double count the hours where I had multiple watches on. If I did then the number of combined hours of “watch on wrist” time would be dramatically higher. 🤪
