If you own an Apple Watch you might have put it on recently and noticed something missing. Didn’t there used to be a Shazam app on it?
I have an original Apple Watch SE and when I strapped it on earlier this week the Shazam shortcut (or ‘complication’ to use the haughty horological term) I had installed in the corner of my favoured aviation-inspired watch face was gone.
Upon further investigation I discovered it had also been removed from the list of customisation options, and when I fired up the Watch app on my iPhone Shazam was nowhere to be found there either.
So I did what any sensible Stuff writer would do and asked the rest of the team if they had experienced similar disappearances. It turned out the Shazam app had also gone AWOL from editor-in-chief Dan Grabham’s Apple Watch Ultra 3 as well. It was time to call in the big guns.
Stuff’s on-call Apple aficionado Craig Grannell has two Apple Watches – presumably one on each arm – so I asked whether he was still able to access Shazam on either of them. He pointed me in the direction of a slightly different, standalone Apple Watch app called Shazam Music Recognition, which must be installed via the App Store on the watch itself.
There’s only one problem: Shazam Music Recognition requires WatchOS 11 or later, which isn’t compatible with my original SE. That’ll be fine for Dan’s Ultra 3 or anything post-Watch Series 5, but if you have anything older you’re also out of luck.
And look, I realise that my Apple Watch is ancient. I reviewed it for this very website in September 2020, back when we were all stuck indoors watching Tiger King, going on government-sanctioned walks, and stockpiling bog roll. That feels like a whole lifetime ago – and not just because of how much time has passed.
But I don’t need a new Apple Watch. At least, I didn’t. My original SE was doing everything I needed it to: it told the time and delivered my messages, it tracked my runs and warned me if it was likely to rain soon, and it could discreetly tell me what song was playing without having to hold my phone in the air like a gormless chump.
Most of the extra features on the newer Apple Watch models don’t particularly interest me. I’m not really bothered about being able to do an electrocardiogram, I can give myself a Sleep Score based on how knackered I feel in the morning, and my family jewels have always functioned as pretty reliable water temperature sensors.
It might not be the most life-changing or life-saving function of an Apple Watch, but I used Shazam enough to have it on my home screen. I used it far more than the Walkie-Talkie app, or the compass, or the bloody Memojis (by which I mean I used it at all). But overnight the ‘legacy’ version of the Shazam app appears to have been removed (I have asked Apple for confirmation of this but am yet to receive a reply) and left me with a watch that’s less useful today than it was a week ago.
Hey Apple, if you’re going to remove functionality from my Apple Watch for no reason, couldn’t you have taken the handwashing timer instead? The last time I used that we still had to queue up and wear masks to get into supermarkets.
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