I bought the Apple Watch Ultra 2 not for the status, but as an everyday freediving computer: depth, dive time, and — most important — how long I need to rest on the surface. I use the stock Depth app and don’t want to pay for a subscription like Oceanic+ at around $10 — it worked fine without one before. After the iOS 26 update (and the watch firmware that came with it), the screen during a session now shows something completely different from what I actually need underwater. If you dive with an Ultra, hold off on updating for now — here’s why.

What I actually need from the watch underwater

I’m not a hardcore freediver, I don’t need much: show me dive time, depth, and surface rest time, and that’s enough. Right now, for example, I see a depth of 0.5 meters (meaning I’m on the surface), water temperature of 27 degrees, and the total session time — 42 minutes 13 seconds. There’s also some session depth record at the bottom of the screen — probably useful for serious freedivers, but personally I don’t need it at all.

How it used to work — and it worked well

On the previous firmware, things were set up smarter. During a dive, the watch showed breath-hold time, current depth, and water temperature. When I surfaced, the screen would freeze — holding onto the data from that specific dive: what time it started, what time it ended. If a dive lasted longer than a minute, the watch showed a range — say, went under at 10:21, surfaced at 10:23. From there I’d multiply the dive time by two or three to figure out how long to rest: if I spent 2 minutes underwater, I needed 4, ideally 6 minutes on the surface, so the next dive shouldn’t happen before 10:29.

What broke after the update

Now, after a dive, the screen doesn’t freeze with the data from that specific dive anymore. All I see is the current total session time and the last overall numbers — for example, that the last dive was 41 seconds, and a moment later that information resets and I’m just left with the overall session counter. That “went under at X, surfaced at Y” pairing that made it easy to calculate rest time is gone.

Why this isn’t a small thing

Underwater, you constantly get distracted: a boat passes by, jet skis show up, you shoot a fish and need to take it off the stringer, then a new school arrives. Doing rest-time math in your head in that situation is inconvenient and unreliable — and freediving is fundamentally about relaxing, not constantly calculating. That’s the whole point of having a computer on your wrist: so you don’t have to count yourself. And now a feature directly tied to safety — avoiding a blackout from too short a rest — has become far less clear.

I’ve already written to Apple support and filed a feature request — hopefully they’ll fix it. In the meantime, I’d like the developers to either bring it back the way it was or make it even better. But if you dive with an Apple Watch Ultra and rely on the stock Depth app as your main dive computer, I wouldn’t rush to update to iOS 26 just yet.