Scroll through your Apple Watch notifications. Notice that sometimes the icon attached to each notification is square, sometimes it’s round.
Mac Kungfu explains why:
Round notification icon: If the icon is round then it’s a notification you can action on the phone because you’ve a Watch version of that app installed. For example, if it’s a Mail message then you will be able to tap the notification to reply to the mail there and then.
Square notification icon: If the icon is square then there is no Watch app for that particular notification. Essentially, the notification is being “echoed” from your iPhone, and all you’ll be able to do is tap to dismiss it.
Great tip!
That’s not really true. Even if the app has no watchOS counterpart (rounded square icon), it can still have additional actions beside dismiss and even inline reply since iOS 9 + watchOS 2.
The only additional features of native notifications (the ones with circular icons) are:
1) tapping a notification body will take you to the watch app because there is one,
2) it can optionally have a nicely designed custom layout that shows more than plain text
I thought this was sort of self-explanatory and pretty intuitive. Didn’t need much explanation. Square icons are iPhone apps, round icons are Watch apps. And the iPhone notifications have all the same actionable capabilities as they do on iOS, such as replying/archiving right from the notification.