How to increase or decrease your Apple Watch screen brightness

This simple tutorial will walk you through the steps to effortlessly increase or decrease the brightness level on your Apple Watch, ensuring the most comfortable viewing experience.

Apple Watch Ultra on a yellow background that illustrates light rays coming out of it

If you find your Apple Watch screen to be too bright or too dim, you may want to try tweaking its brightness settings. You can actually change the brightness for the Apple Watch screen directly from the watch or from its companion app on the paired iPhone.

There isn’t a huge range of adjustability when it comes to screen brightness, but it’s still worth establishing a screen brightness setting that works for you.

Adjust your Apple Watch screen brightness

Here are two ways to do that.

From the watch

  1. Press the Digital Crown to see all your apps and tap Settings.
  2. Scroll down and tap Display & Brightness.
  3. Tap the lower brightness or higher brightness buttons. You may also tap the brightness field and then rotate the Digital Crown to change the brightness levels.
Change Apple Watch screen brightness from its display settings

Using your iPhone

  1. Open the Watch app on your paired iPhone.
  2. Make sure you’re in the My Watch section and tap Display & Brightness.
  3. Adjust the brightness slider to left, center, or right.
Change Apple Watch brightness using iPhone

By default, the Apple Watch comes with the middle brightness option set. Sadly, no matter where you adjust the setting from, there are only three levels of brightness available.

What do you think about the brightness options available in the Apple Watch settings? Do you think it’s enough, or do you think there should be more brightness levels to choose from?

Note: I’ve noticed that even if your Apple Watch is set to its maximum brightness, its screen brightness may go higher when you view it under strong light or in sunlight. I’ve talked more about this in my article titled Apple Watch screen too dim? Here’s how to make it brighter.

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