Skyty 1.5 — Position on the watch face, altitude in the corner, signal not required
because the simplest gesture on a long-haul is the wrist-flick.
You’re awake at 03:17 in seat 24A. The cabin is dark, the shade is down, and you have this hunch that something interesting is below you — a coast, a city, a sea. To check, you have to fish your phone out of the pocket, unlock it, open Skyty, wait for the layout. By the time you’ve done all that you’ve missed three minutes of “below.”
Skyty 1.5 ships today. The fastest move at FL370 is now a glance at your wrist.
A full Watch app
Skyty has been a glance app from day one — you open it, you see a city, an altitude, a nearest airport, and you close it. The Apple Watch is the natural home for that kind of interaction, and 1.5 brings the whole thing across.
The main Watch view shows what the iPhone shows on its top panel:
- city name (offline reverse geocode, no network needed)
- coordinates
- altitude, ground speed, and current heading
- the nearest airport with its ICAO code and distance
- a record indicator when an auto-recording is running
It’s the iPhone’s hero panel, but sized for the wrist.
Four complications
Where this gets interesting is the complications. You can put Skyty on most modern watch faces — Wayfinder is the obvious one for flights, but Modular, Infograph and Chronograph Pro all work.
- Position — a rectangular complication that prints your city, altitude and speed all at once. Best as the wide slot on Wayfinder or Modular.
- Position (Inline) — one line: city + altitude. Drops into the inline slot above the clock on Modular, or below it on Infograph.
- Altitude — a circular complication with just the meters. The smallest commitment, the cleanest read.
- Altitude (Corner) — altitude in the bottom corner of Infograph or Chronograph Pro, next to the date and battery.
Mix and match. Two slots is enough to see your altitude AND where you are without opening anything.
Live, via WatchConnectivity
Apple’s WatchConnectivity framework is the bridge. When the iPhone is reachable, the Watch sees every GPS update within a couple of seconds. The framework batches and compresses the data, so the Watch’s battery doesn’t notice.
When the iPhone isn’t reachable — say it’s in the seat pocket and Bluetooth coughs for a moment — the Watch transparently falls back to its own GPS receiver. You lose the city name (the geocoder is on the iPhone), but altitude and coordinates keep updating. As soon as the iPhone is back, the city comes back too.
This is the part that took the longest to get right. Apple’s documentation makes WCSession sound straightforward; in practice the state machine for “iPhone in range but app backgrounded but Watch app foregrounded with a stale context” is its own puzzle. We’ve tuned the failover so that what you see on the Watch matches what the iPhone has, with a worst-case lag of about three seconds.
Same offline-first DNA
Three things that don’t happen on the Watch:
- No network call. Ever. Not for the city name, not for the airport, not for the heading.
- No telemetry. The Watch doesn’t tell us anything. We can’t see who installed it.
- No login. No account, no sync, no cloud. The Watch app pairs to the iPhone, and that’s the only “connection” it makes.
It’s the same promise as the iPhone app, and it works in airplane mode at FL400.
Smart Stack
If you keep Skyty in your Watch’s Smart Stack — and you should — the card rises to the top whenever a flight is being auto-recorded. We use Apple’s TimelineEntryRelevance API to set the relevance score to 100 during a flight, 25 otherwise. So during boarding, taxi, climb, cruise and descent, a flick of the wrist puts Skyty front and center. After landing, it gets out of the way.
Plus: the 1.4 hotfixes, included
1.5 carries forward two hotfixes from the 1.4 line:
- No more accidental flights on the Autobahn. The motion-sensor fusion from 1.4.2 means auto-recording knows the difference between FL370 and ICE 581.
- Prepare for Flight works without GPS now. The 1.4.1 fix for the dead “Prepare” button when Settings opens before the first GPS fix.
If you skipped those because the App Store didn’t push the update aggressively, 1.5 gets you everything in one go.
Where to get it
App Store → Skyty → Update. Auto-update users already have it. The Watch app installs alongside automatically — you’ll see a prompt on the paired Watch the next time you open Skyty.
The Watch companion is included with the app — no premium upgrade.
What’s next
For 1.6, we’re wiring up the Action Button — both on iPhone 15 and newer Pro models, and on Apple Watch Ultra. One press, recording on or off. The plan is to make capturing a flight as low-friction as taking a photo.
Until then: the next time you fly red-eye, put the Wayfinder face on your Watch with the Position complication in the wide slot. At 03:17 in 24A, the answer to “what’s below” will be one wrist-flick away.