Ant Browser: Web on your Watch

You get like 5 web views a day (basically a browser session) which is enough for me but you can pay 5$ for unlimited which is nice. The browser is actually better than the native safari and can open modern web pages better like reddit and other news sites.

For the longest time, my Apple Watch (series 6) has had a bug where the default WebKit (the one Siri and messages use) does not properly render sites and instead just shows a black page with the URL bar. This bug has also broken all the other browser apps I’ve tried. The remarkable thing about Ant browser in particular is that it manages to get around the rendering bug, which I’m assuming is possible because it doesn’t use the regular WebKit and instead renders it fullscreen via something else. The only complaint I have is that it lags and crashes much more than the regular WebKit (even if I turn off JavaScript) but I’m assuming that it will be optimized more in the future. Additionally, some large sites (like certain Wikipedia articles) completely crash the entire app when viewed in reader mode…

The lack of reviews made me hesitant to buy this app. Since it was a one-time (and fairly inexpensive) one to buy, as opposed to the more expensive subscriptions so many apps now require, I figured that I would take a chance. I am delighted to report that it works beautifully. Now I can take a quick look at websites on my watch, without drawing attention to it, as it would do if I were instead on my iPhone. I wish it would permit videos to play on my Apple Watch 10, but that is probably a limitation of the watch, itself. At any rate, great app - nicely done.