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In WatchOS 10, side button now useless

dsteve said:
It’s all personal opinion, but I arranged my grid view by importance/usefulness, which is a far more useful order for me personally than an unmodifiable alphabetical list.
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That’s what I tried to do, but found it infuriatingly difficult to get apps to stay where I wanted them to. One wrong move and everything shuffles around. I wish there was a setting in the watch app where you could plan the layout and choose which apps to lock in place.

I ended up just using the user-hostile alphabetic list instead.
 
Monkswhiskers said:
Works for me, never used the dock and hated swipe up for control centre (hit and miss with sweaty fingers.). I like smart stacks as I can now use watch faces that don't have complications whereas before I never did.
Horses for courses I guess. But for those missing the old way there should be the option to change back.
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Agree, except for those watch apps without widgets. Can't put 'em in the smart stack. So, for now any way, you have to choose between scrolling through the app list or using the grid view.
 
dsteve said:
If you’re doing it on the watch, maybe try doing it in the watch app on your phone? Same behavior, just more room to work with.
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🤦‍♂️

The "Arrangement" button only shows up after selecting "Grid View".

Thanks! That's a small step in the right direction, will give it another shot.
 
Five_Oh said:
Agree, except for those watch apps without widgets. Can't put 'em in the smart stack. So, for now any way, you have to choose between scrolling through the app list or using the grid view.
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Having had the beta for a while I assumed that the limited choice was down to that, so yea, that is a bummer, hopefully more will be introduced.
 
dsteve said:
It’s all personal opinion, but I arranged my grid view by importance/usefulness, which is a far more useful order for me personally than an unmodifiable alphabetical list.
Click to expand...


I did the same. I haven’t upgraded to 10 yet, but this gives me reservations more than anything else specifically. The x.0 is the biggest thing of course, I avoid those in general. I will upgrade inevitably though and modify behaviour, obviously. Not like we have a choice. :D
 
I hate it. I logged in just to see if there's any way to change the button's function (why is that limited to the "action button" on the Ultra? silly).

Like OP, I used the side button all the time to pull up the app switcher and never used control center. Double-tapping the crown brings up an app switcher, but it's worse than the old one—the cards are much larger, and I now have to scroll to find my workout app where I didn't have to scroll before.

This, combined with the odd rearrangement of the workout buttons, makes for a very poor update. Unless I wind up using the widget stuff (why are there two methods to get there, though?), this is just a straight downgrade. I was going to buy the S9 today after work, but not anymore.
 
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why doesn't apple give people the choice of what they want actions/buttons to do ? how hard could that be, I mean its all code so give Joe the option to swipe for the dock, and Jack the option to quadruple click while holding left button for three seconds to change watch face. maybe it will be a feature in a new OS and chip only upgrade
 
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dsteve said:
It’s all personal opinion, but I arranged my grid view by importance/usefulness, which is a far more useful order for me personally than an unmodifiable alphabetical list.
Click to expand...

I somehow had an instinctive aversion to the grid (honeycom) view and used the alphabetical list for the longest time until for some reason I tried honeycomb and now like it so much that I think I’m miss it when I get my new series 9 tomorrow.

Like you I keep my most important/used apps in the central area but I go one step further and also try to make some use of the 2-dimensional nature of the honeycomb grid so for less frequently used apps where I need to scroll the grid to get to them I have them organised so that all of my more system type apps are in the 6-o-clock direction, the health-related stuff in the 9-o-clock direction, the travel-related stuff in the 12-o-clock direction and the general/other stuff in the 3-o-clock direction. It means that if what I want isn’t immediately on screen I know which way to scroll the honeycomb grid and I never have to scroll too far.

I’ll still use the grid rather than the alphabetical list and will do as you do and have my most important stuff towards the top but now that grid scrolling is 1D rather than 2D I will lose the ability to also impose at least a crude category organisation on my apps as well.
 
I came to find community among the folks unsettled by the UI changes in WatchOS 10, but wish I the OP tone and responses didn't come off as so hostile. For the record, I'm not thrilled with the UI changes but do not see conspiracy in Apple's thinking or any reason to undermine the views of people who disagree...

I still haven't had time to dive into settings, so maybe there's ways around the stuff I don't like. I've never needed to do much with setting in the past though, the Watch just always kind of behaved as expected.

I also almost never used the Dock except sometimes while driving to find maps or music if they lost foreground. I use control center more often, at least twice a day to put it into and out of sleep mode-- but sliding up from the bottom is old hat for me and mirrors a lot of the swipe gestures on the phone. I'd almost rather the side button be a second action button, frankly. It still feels under utilized.

I hate the turn the crown for widgets UI. I like the crown interacting with the watch face and active app. Especially if I can just swipe up to initiate that view. I don't use widgets beyond what's on screen.

I use my watch primarily for quick glance information and as a remote for things like turn-by-turn and music. There just aren't many apps I'm motivated to use and I'm kind of annoyed that everything I do seems to put them in my face. The only thing I can think of is that the developer community felt that it was too hard to access applications and so weren't bothering to write them. Maybe this is a way to improve that?

Maybe I'm still stuck in the mindset of my watch being a watch first and foremost.
 
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And since the dock module was already written & in place, how hard would it have been to retain the dock and use another method to activate it? Although I can't understand why the control panel had to be moved to the side button from an up swipe in the first place.
 
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Fleetboy said:
And since the dock module was already written & in place, how hard would it have been to retain the dock and use another method to activate it? Although I can't understand why the control panel had to be moved to the side button from an up swipe in the first place.
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To be clear, the dock still exists. Double click the crown to access it.
 
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Having used Siri watch face for the last few years, I am digging smart stacks. It brings widgets to my wrist without locking me into a particular watch face.

I do use control centre from time to time to check my battery percentage and toggle the flashlight, and I am indifferent to the change.

In all, quite welcome changes that make my watch feeling fresh all over.
 
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I too, want the dock back. And swipe up for Control Centre. Double clicking the crown is not a substitute for the dock, it’s a recently used items list and won’t show some apps I used to have pinned in the dock like my local transport app.
It’s all programmable so why can’t Apple give users the choice of what triggers what. If you want the dock on the side button - fine. If you want a single app on swipe up - fine, just assign it in settings.
It should be up to each user, not dictated by Apple on a whim of creating change for change sake.
 
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QCassidy352 said:
The dock was really good. I can't see why they got rid of it. The rest of OS10 is ok, but overall, I like 9 better because of the way they messed with the swipe up, side button, and swipe from side to side for watch faces. Really baffling and negative changes.
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What really baffles me on so much Apple stuff is why they seem to hate configurable functionality so much. Phones and watches are very personal devices so why is it so difficult to allow us to customise what the buttons and gestures do?

The nice thing about customisation options is that if the defaults are set to the previous standard behaviour then anyone who was happy with the way something behaved before will see no difference whatsoever and anyone who unboxes a new watch can still search the internet for how-to videos and, assuming the creators are sensible enough to make those videos based on standard default behaviour rather that "this is how to do X on a watch configured in my own weird way", the wealth of information resources out there to help new users remains valid.

Yes, it's some more clutter in settings but there is already a lot of stuff in settings and it could all be grouped under a single "Button and Gesture actions" section so one more thing under settings doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Please Apple, up your game on this one.
 
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Analog Kid said:
Oh, the other thing I really miss is being able to swipe between watch faces-- it lowered the effort of having a few similar but differently configured pages without needing to pile all the complications into one face. Now it's a push, slide, accept model that makes it much less convenient.
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There's also something to be said for a common experience across devices(*) and to me swiping between watch faces to get to different selections of complications/functionality was very much like swiping between pages on an iPhone home screen.

(*) Within reason. Some would say that Apple is crippling its iPads, especially the bigger ones, by staying too close to the iPhone UI. I wouldn't disagree with that viewpoint.

My hope was that they would take that aspect of AW/iPhone commonality further and offer a watch face that was simply a 3 x 3 grid of complications so that to get to my 9 most used apps (after the ones that are accessible from complications on my main watch face) I could simply swipe left (or right) to get to a launcher (my made up name) watch face. With a differently configured launcher face to both the left and right of the main face one could get 18 extra apps all accessible with a swipe and a tap - no button presses required. I'm really disappointed to see Apple go in exactly the opposite direction.
 
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JulianL said:
My hope was that they would take that aspect of AW/iPhone commonality further and offer a watch face that was simply a 3 x 3 grid of complications so that to get to my 9 most used apps (after the ones that are accessible from complications on my main watch face) I could simply swipe left (or right) to get to a launcher (my made up name) watch face. With a differently configured launcher face to both the left and right of the main face one could get 18 extra apps all accessible with a swipe and a tap - no button presses required. I'm really disappointed to see Apple go in exactly the opposite direction.
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If you’d be willing to do that so you can do one swipe long press/swipe and one two taps for 2x9 apps, why not use the grid view and manually sort it by importance?

That is a button push and a tap for 17 apps (45mm series 7 sized screen), and scroll access to all others.
 
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Also not a fan of how Apple Watch now decided to only charge my watch to 80% unless I tap on the charging ring to make it charge full. I don't have optimized battery charging turned on, either. I top my watch up to 100% every morning when I wake up and then do a full recharge in the evening before I got to bed, and it was all just peachy until the new Watch OS, where my morning charge only goes to 80% unless I remember to tell it not to.
 
Canyda said:
Also not a fan of how Apple Watch now decided to only charge my watch to 80% unless I tap on the charging ring to make it charge full. I don't have optimized battery charging turned on, either. I top my watch up to 100% every morning when I wake up and then do a full recharge in the evening before I got to bed, and it was all just peachy until the new Watch OS, where my morning charge only goes to 80% unless I remember to tell it not to.
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Something’s wrong, and it isn’t actually off. Ugh.

Seems like you need to try some combination of turning optimized charging back on/off and rebooting the watch.
 
dsteve said:
Something’s wrong, and it isn’t actually off. Ugh.

Seems like you need to try some combination of turning optimized charging back on/off and rebooting the watch.
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I also find my watch charges super slow now. It's been on for an hour and had gone up 1%. Nothing has changed in my setup other than the new OS.

I'll try a reboot. Thanks.
 
I wish it was possible to customise the buttons so they functioned as previously, and not fan of a lot of the changes. Mostly i hate that it's not possible to access control center with an "up swipe", i do not like using the side button for that. Why make this change? Smart stack can also be accessed by turning the digital crow, makes no sense to me.

In general it feels like they they decided to just move around function, just because. Not a fan of this update, but i do like the new ultra watch face.

A bug i noticed is the watch face turns red when raising the hand, and the normal. Just slightly anoying.
 
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