Last updated: 15 September 2026
8 Ball is a fortune-telling ball for Apple Watch: ask a yes-or-no question, shake your wrist, and read one of the twenty classic replies. It runs on the watch alone, with no iPhone app needed. It is a one-time purchase with nothing else to buy, and there is no account, no server, no advertising, no analytics, and no tracking — the app contains no networking code at all, so it works exactly the same with the watch offline.
The fastest way to reach us is email:
ivnsjdev@gmail.com
We aim to reply within 2–3 business days. To help us help you faster, please include:
Three ways, whichever suits the moment:
The ball winds up, tumbles, and the answer window swings round into view. You will feel three taps while it thinks and one when it answers, so it works without looking.
Apple Watch running watchOS 11 or later. 8 Ball is a standalone watch app: there is no iPhone app to install, and it does not need your phone nearby or an internet connection.
Press and hold the ball for about half a second. Settings has three rows — Skin, Emblem, and Language — and each shows what is currently chosen.
The long press is used rather than the Digital Crown because the crown is one of the ways to ask the ball, and a list on the main screen would take it away from that.
One payment on the App Store, at the price shown on its listing for your country. After that there is nothing else to buy: no in-app purchases, no subscription, no paid tier, and no advertising. Every skin, every emblem and all 32 languages are included from the start — nothing is held back or unlocked later. The app contains no purchase code at all, so nothing inside it can charge you again.
Apple handles all App Store billing, so we never see your payment details. To query the charge or request a refund, use reportaproblem.apple.com.
Yes. It has no server, no analytics, no ads, and no third-party SDKs, and it contains no networking code of any kind. It never receives your question, because there is nowhere to type one. The only things saved are the skin, emblem, and language you picked, and they stay on your watch. See the Privacy Policy for full detail.
Yes. 8 Ball is rated 4+ and family-friendly: no chat, no sharing, no social features, no advertising, and nothing to buy. The twenty replies are the classic toy’s replies. It is a toy for settling what to have for lunch, not a source of advice.
Yes. Each reply is drawn uniformly from the twenty using the system random number generator, and the draw happens before the ball starts moving. The tumble then displays a result that has already been decided — it does not steer toward one.
Because that is what a fair draw does. Every ask is an independent 1-in-20, and the previous answer is deliberately not filtered out of the next one. A real 8 ball repeats, and removing the last reply from the pool would make the draw measurably non-uniform. Over twenty asks, a repeat somewhere is the likely outcome, not a bug.
No, and it cannot. There is no text field, no dictation, and no microphone use. You ask out loud or in your head; the app only sees a shake, a crown turn, or a tap.
No. The three tones — Affirmative, Non-committal, and Negative — only tint the answer window so you can read the verdict before you read the words. There are ten affirmative, five non-committal, and five negative replies, and each of the twenty is equally likely, so the tones are not equally likely to each other.
There isn’t one, by design. The reply is held in memory while it is on screen and is never written to storage, so it is gone when the app closes. Nothing accumulates.
The shake detector is tuned to a deliberate wrist flick — it wants a peak of roughly 2 g sustained across about half a second, which raising your arm, walking, a clap, or a knock against a table will not produce. Flick your wrist as if shaking down a thermometer.
If it still does nothing:
The trigger needs a sustained shake rather than a single spike, so accidental rolls are rare. If your daily movement is setting it off, use the crown or a tap and tell us what you were doing — the thresholds are tunable and real reports are how they get tuned.
VoiceOver takes the shake gesture for its own navigation. Tapping the ball still asks, and so does the crown; the ball is also exposed as a button, so a VoiceOver double-tap works. The answer is announced as it arrives, with its tone.
Press and hold the ball to open Settings, then Skin for the ball itself or Emblem for the mark on its shoulder. Each picker shows the choice on a real ball before you commit.
There are twelve skins — Classic, Ivory, Slate, Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire, Amethyst, Rose, Gold, Ember, Aurora, Neon — and twelve emblems — Eight, Question, Star, Moon, Sparkles, Bolt, Flame, Heart, Spade, Pool Ball, Crystal Ball, Dice. That is 144 combinations, and all of them are unlocked from the start.
No. Every one is available immediately. There is nothing to unlock, earn, or buy.
Your choices live in the app’s local data on the watch, with no account or iCloud sync behind them, so deleting the app clears them. Pick them again in Settings — it costs nothing and everything is still unlocked.
Press and hold the ball → Settings → Language. 8 Ball carries 32 languages and its picker is independent of your watch’s language, so you can read the ball in one language on a watch set to another. Right-to-left languages lay the app out right-to-left.
Turn on Reduce Motion (Watch app on iPhone → Accessibility, or Settings → Accessibility on the watch). 8 Ball honours it with a much shorter, calmer roll rather than the full tumble. The answer is unchanged — it was drawn before the animation started either way.
Yes. The ball is a labelled button, and each answer is announced along with its tone as it arrives, so a question can be asked and answered without seeing the screen. Swiping back to the ball repeats the current answer.
Yes. When your wrist drops, the animation stops immediately rather than running unseen, and the accelerometer is switched off whenever the app is not in the foreground — a live motion sensor is the real battery cost on a watch, not the drawing.
The answer window is also marked privacy sensitive, so watchOS redacts it in the dim state. Someone glancing at your lowered wrist does not read your answer.
Not in this version. 8 Ball is the app alone.
8 Ball is watch-only. The same 8-ball, with the rest of a randomizer around it, is part of Pickify on iPhone and iPad.
Please email ivnsjdev@gmail.com. Bug reports with the details listed under Contact above are the most useful, and feature requests are genuinely read.
8 Ball is licensed under Apple’s standard licence agreement for apps, the Apple Standard End User License Agreement. App Store downloads are additionally governed by the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.