How to use the new Wrist Flick gesture on Apple Watch

Learn how to use the new wrist flick gesture in watchOS 26 to silence calls, dismiss alerts, snooze alarms, and more without touching your Apple Watch screen.

watchOS 26 (currently in beta) brings a new wrist flick gesture to dismiss notifications, snooze alarms, go to the watch face, and more when you’re too busy to interact with the screen. Available on the Apple Watch Series 9 and newer and Apple Watch Ultra 2 running watchOS 26, the gesture uses built-in accelerometer and gyroscope sensors and a machine learning model running on-device.

Wrist flick is a very simple gesture, and you’ll get the hang of it in no time, so follow along with us as we show you how to use it on your Apple Watch.

How to use the wrist flick gesture on Apple Watch

Using the gesture couldn’t be simpler. First, raise your wrist to check a notification. And then, quickly flick your wrist forward and back towards your face to dismiss the notification. Wrist flick is turned on by default on supported Apple Watch models. You can toggle in by going to Settings > Gestures > Wrist Flick directly on the watch or the Gestures menu in the companion Watch app on your paired iPhone.

Use cases for the wrist flick gesture

I frequently use the wrist flick gesture to perform these actions:

• Dismiss a notification.
• Snooze an alarm.
• Dismiss a timer.
• Close the Control Center.
• Dismiss the Smart Stack.
• Return to the main screen in the Workout app.
• Silence an incoming phone call (first flick) or decline it (second flick).
• Go to the watch face; sometimes the first flick takes me to the Home Screen and the second one to the watch face.

Wrist flick plays nice with the double-tap gesture

Flicking your wrist will decline an incoming call, but what if you want to answer it hands-free? In such situations, the double-tap gesture is your friend. With it, you can answer calls, reply to texts, and scroll through your Smart Stack simply by double-tapping your index finger and thumb together.

Unfortunately, the new wrist flick gesture in watchOS 26 is unavailable on the Apple Watch SE models, Apple Watch Series 8 and older, and the first Apple Watch Ultra. This could be because older watches lack the power to run the local machine learning model efficiently, resulting in a slower response time.

How do you like the wrist flick gesture in watchOS 26? And what about the finger tap gesture? Do you use it at all? Let us know in the comments down below!

Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/08/05/wrist-flick-gesture-apple-watch-tutorial/