Apple's watchOS 7 will finally let you set your own stand and exercise goals

Apple Watch Watchos7 Goal Change (Image credit: Oliver Haslam / iMore)

What you need to know

Apple has announced a new feature that's coming to watchOS 7 and it's long overdue.
With watchOS 7 installed, users will be able to change their Stand Goal and Exercise Goal.
The new feature wasn't announced when watchOS 7 was first shown at WWDC in June.

Apple's September special event came and went yesterday and it brought a ton of new hardware. But it also saw the announcement that watchOS 7 will ship today, quite out of the blue. We also learned of a new feature that Apple had kept under its hat – the ability to edit our Apple Watch Exercise Goal and Stand Goal.

This is the first time that the ability to change these goals has been offered up and, frankly, it shouldn't have taken this long.

Users will be able to change their gaols from within the Activity app on their Apple Watch, with settings available as low as 10 minutes of exercise and six standing ours.

Apple will release watchOS 7, alongside iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 7 to the public later today. It's been through months of beta testing with developers and members of the public beta testing program, but the GM build was only released yesterday. If you're taking the plunge today, make sure you have a backup ready just in case!

Apple's watchOS 7 update will be available for Apple Watch Series 4, Series 4, Series 5, Series 6, and Apple Watch SE.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.