I hear you, and I agree, it was a great feature that I am not happy about losing. Funny to picture you doing that —-^ …I didn’t use it to show others myself much, but I used it for my own info quite often…
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OS10 is a failure
- Thread starter edhchoe
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I love the changes so far and agree that some things should be changed to make room for previous functionality. Not just because it’s the old way of doing things, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! I think there’s room for some of both
Ah man, early watchOS was so bizarre in retrospect!
As for my take on watchOS 10, I was vaguely aware of the watch face swiping feature, but it would trigger when I was wearing a long sleeve shirt that was sweaty (which admittedly happens a lot, since I sweat). I’d typically tap and hold when I intentionally changed faces (because the face I’m wanting to switch to may not be adjacent to the one I’m on). If you use different faces at different times of day, I’d suggest setting up some focuses on your iPhone and assigning a watch face to them.
The new home screen (ie the app screen, or Carousel to use its internal name) took a moment to get used to, but it’s so much better than the old one. I honestly haven’t used the widgets feature too much (I could see using it more once OmniFocus supports it), and I wish you could access it within any app the way you could Control Center and you still can notifications. The dock being just recently used apps is a little annoying, but I’ve gotten used to it.
One way I use it is to group like sets of apps together. Health/fitness apps are lumped together, weather apps are lumped together, the default apps I never use are at the bottom. It is so much nicer than it was before, though, because you now have more apps immediately accessible on the first screenful of apps.
What I find most unusable about the new app switcher UI is that it doesn’t show the app’s icon or title anywhere in the UI. Seems like a total miss to me (or a bug?)
That does seem to be the case, but I previously used the dock as a way to open or to quickly glance at without opening certain apps. For the latter, it works just as well, so long as you’ve opened the app recently.
I wonder if I am the outlier in that I never really used the features that got axed in watchOS 10. I don't swipe to change watch faces (I have automations to change them based on the time of day, or prefer to do so via the watch app on my phone), I don't access my recently-used apps, and I am liking the new widget view because it means I am not longer locked into the Siri watch face (which I have basically been using since 2019).
i dont really use my watch much cuz of other changes with new update that i dont like (multitasking, clunkier redesigned apps, etc). But I think op is greatly exaggerating the failure of os 10 based on a minor thing.
this watch face is what I need on my AW. I don't want a bulky Ultra AW. Give me just that face with 8 complications and HH:MM:SS
And also the email complication needs to show new mail count. Apple has been failing to do so for a very long time. It used to show it. but Apple got rid of it. half wits.
May i rant also ……
yes - yes. - yes
i want to add more but still i need to read all the comment .
Agreed. Unfortunately, this very minor change appears to have ruined the lives of many people though.
Little reminder:
Swipe=1
Press, Swipe and Tap=3
Swipe=1
Press, Swipe and Tap=3
wOS could really use some personalization options, Apple made some unwelcome changes. They should really give users a toggle for what behaviour they want. But that's the Apple way, I joke that all Apple devices are made in the ways that best suit Tim, and he told the engineers that he doesn't like accidentally changing watch faces so here we are... There is some truth to that, there is only the Apple way and you are either going to love it or hate it. Personally, it takes me literally 3 minutes with Wear OS before I am ready to go back to Apple. So no matter how bad Apple messes it up I'll still take that over switching to that Google crap (and I daily drive a Pixel and love Android, but I had Wear OS watches and they were always trash).
From an accessibility perspective alone, not having any sort of icon or label makes it a much harder UI to parse. So many apps look similar and if you don’t know what your apps look like then it’s really not a good UI at all.
It’s especially odd when the same general multitasking UI on iOS and iPadOS have both icons and labels.
Tbh it doesn't really make sense to me to axe this feature of quick swipe.
Using multiple watch faces and customizing the watch with them always felt like such a core concept of the Apple Watch. And with each release, even the latest watchOS Apple added new watch faces like the Snoopy, which feels like a clear hint that most users would switch between watch faces often through out the day (Snoopy is nice and fun, but barely useful for anything than reading the time, so I'd switch back and forth between this and at least 1-2 other faces all the time). So why make this harder and less intuitive?
Also, suddenly after 10 years of watchOS Apple realized accidental swipes are a huge UX issue?
I wonder if the real reason could be a system resources issue due to massive changes on single watch faces consuming greater amount of resources. And they disabled fast swiping kind of last minute to avoid bad UX due to lags & stutter.
Even when my Series 7 was brand new I sometimes noticed quickly swiping through several watch faces causes small amounts of stutter in animations and at times watch faces even needing some longer time to load. But most of the time this wasn't an issue, esp. not when just switching between the same 3-5 faces all day long.
However, with all the redesign work, perhaps watchOS simply ran out of resources when fast swiping? And disabling the feature was like a last resort solution. The extra steps of user interaction to send a watch face in the background, swipe through non-interactive thumbnails then tap to activate the final face, certainly buys watchOS more time to freeze and store a face, then load and restore another and clean up resources in the background.
I don't know if it is a failure or not - but I hate trying to find apps, closing apps and getting back to watch face is impossible, I set siri off all the time and I hate siri. I often now just use my old timex. the digital crown etc changes are not good at all
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That’s a great idea. Hope they do that! The new SIP and extra RAM seems powerful enough to handle that.
I’m slowly warming to it. I can use watch faces without any complications, just scroll up to get the cards, the info I want is usually among the top three cards, and are of course more visible than just the complications alone.
I don’t mind losing the easy watch face changing, it was more of a frustration for me with daily ghost swaps.
The Now Playing thing is WAY more functional now than it ever was, I like that!
It still feels off somehow though.
I don’t mind losing the easy watch face changing, it was more of a frustration for me with daily ghost swaps.
The Now Playing thing is WAY more functional now than it ever was, I like that!
It still feels off somehow though.
Point of clarification — the way it works now is how it was for a couple years when the watch came out. The swipe was added later.
To use the scroll I have to wake the screen first.
My AW6 has AOD but I have to make it wake up before I can scroll up to see the widgets.
A lot of times I am touching the screen to wake it up and I am touching something on the screen and i am already in an app making the scroll unusable.
My Ultra 1 starts the widgets when I scroll even when not woken, should be the same on a Series 6?
Sweeping negative thread title - check.
Multiple exclamation marks, the sure sign of... - check.
Thread makes it to the home page - check.
Always fun to look at these before I turn "Featured" off on another Mac.