Are There Really Hidden Cameras Inside The Apple Watch Ultra?

The Apple Watch series of smartwatches has become a reliably successful product category for the Cupertino, California-based computing giant, and with that success comes knockoffs. The smartwatch product category has grown with it in general, but there are also companies making knock-off Apple Watches that, thanks to their differing feature sets from the Apple original, have led to some confusion on social media. More specifically, it comes down to how the Apple Watch in all of its guises, including the Apple Watch Ultra, doesn't have a camera, while some of the knock-offs do.

Videos showcasing the alleged secret hidden Apple Watch camera have spread like wildfire on TikTok in particular. One such video has 1.8 million likes, 10,300 comments, 237,600 bookmarks, and 299,800 shares, while another has 241,000 likes, 2,085 comments, 22,500 bookmarks, and 33,800 shares. The more popular of the two videos appears to be specifically posted to drive people to order the knock-off watch from some related website, as the description implores the viewer to "Go to Profile to Order yours." The other video, from verified TikTok-er Arnie Negrete, doesn't direct anyone to any specific website to order the watch. But it's very clear that he's claiming to have ordered a genuine Apple Watch from Amazon, complete with unboxing. The exterior of the watch, including the crown with the "hidden camera," looks very similar to the Apple Watch, but if you look closely in both videos, they're clearly not Apple Watches, as their home screens feature the Google Play Store.

There are numerous ways to determine that the smartwatch being shown in the viral TikTok videos is not an Apple Watch. Though it runs a theme that mimics the look of watchOS, the Google Play Store icon is visible on the home screen, indicating that the watch is an Android device of some kind. If that wasn't enough to convince you, Apple does not promote its watches as having cameras. iFixit's tear-downs of Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 also make no mention of them having cameras. Apple's been granted patents for different ways to add cameras to the Apple Watch, but none have been implemented just yet.

So if it's not an Apple Watch, what exactly is it? From what we can find on YouTube and sites like AliExpress, the most common name for the Android-based watch in the viral TikTok videos is, roughly, the CDS9 Honeycomb Ultra. Perhaps most notably, besides matching the watch in the TikTok videos, the AliExpress listing claims that it runs Android 8.1 from 2017, not the newer Wear OS branch of Android. If you think that's possibly a badly translated typo or some other attempt to refer to a Wear OS version, it's not, as Wear OS is only up to it's fifth major version, meaning this runs a very outdated version of plain Android. Mainstream smartwatches largely eschew cameras now, so if you want one with a camera, you need an older or more esoteric watch.