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watchOS Is the Blind Spot in App Store Connect Analytics

App Store Connect Analytics still excludes watchOS, even after its 100-metric overhaul — here's what to instrument yourself to cover the gap.

Analytics

Apple’s overhaul of Analytics in App Store Connect earlier this year added more than 100 new metrics, cohort analysis, peer benchmarks, and a full monetization dashboard covering In-App Purchases and subscriptions. It’s the biggest jump the platform has had since launch, and it covers iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It does not cover watchOS. If your app ships a Watch companion, or a standalone watchOS app, Apple’s own analytics dashboard has effectively nothing to say about how it performs — no sessions, no retention, no monetization data, none of the 100 new metrics.

Teams that assume App Store Connect Analytics gives them a complete cross-platform picture routinely miss this until someone asks a specific question about Watch engagement and discovers there’s no dashboard to answer it from. That’s a bad time to find out, because by then the app has usually shipped Watch-specific features — complications, background refresh, workout integrations — with no way to tell whether anyone is actually using them, whether the companion app drives retention on the phone, or whether it’s dead weight. Unlike most Apple platform gaps, this isn’t a beta limitation waiting on a future release; it’s been the standing state of the tool through its biggest-ever update, so waiting for Apple to fill it isn’t a plan.

Data Points to Track

  • Watch app session starts and duration, logged independently from the paired iPhone session, since a Watch session can start and end without ever touching the phone app in the same window
  • Complication engagement, capturing which complications are added, how often they’re tapped, and how long they stay on a user’s active watch face before being removed
  • Companion-vs-standalone launch source, distinguishing sessions launched directly from the Watch versus ones triggered by a handoff or notification from the paired iPhone app
  • Watch-specific feature usage, such as workout tracking starts/completions, background refresh success rate, and any Watch-only actions that don’t exist in the iPhone app
  • Retention correlation between Watch and iPhone cohorts, comparing users who have the Watch app installed and active against those who only use the iPhone app, to establish whether the Watch companion is actually driving loyalty or is incidental

Setup Steps

  1. Instrument your own analytics SDK inside the watchOS target exactly as you would the iOS target — don’t assume shared code automatically reports Watch-originated events, since WatchConnectivity sessions and independent network calls both need explicit event tracking.
  2. Tag every event with a platform dimension (watchos vs. ios) at the point of capture, so a single unified events table can still answer platform-specific questions without a separate pipeline.
  3. Track complication lifecycle events — added, removed, tapped — using ClockKit/WidgetKit complication APIs, since this data has no equivalent anywhere in App Store Connect.
  4. Build a Watch-vs-no-Watch retention cohort comparison in your own analytics tool, joining watchOS install/session data against the iPhone user ID for the same account.
  5. Set a recurring review of Watch-specific metrics alongside your regular iOS release review, since nothing will surface this data automatically the way Play Console or the new App Store Connect dashboard does for other platforms.

Actionable Insights

If Watch-app users show meaningfully higher iPhone retention than non-Watch users, that’s a strong argument for investing further in the companion experience, even without Apple-side data to point to — the phone-side retention lift is the evidence, and it’s fully visible in your own analytics regardless of the App Store Connect gap. If complication add rate is high but tap-through is near zero, users are choosing the complication as a passive status indicator rather than an entry point, which should shift roadmap effort away from making it more tappable and toward making the glanceable information itself more useful. And if Watch session starts are dropping while iPhone sessions hold steady, that’s a signal worth catching early — since nothing in App Store Connect will flag it, a standing dashboard on your own analytics is the only way this doesn’t go unnoticed for months.

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