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perezr10

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 12, 2014
2,025
1,494
Monroe, Louisiana
I could've swore that I saw somewhere that the new Heart complication in watchOS 4 should display your last measured heart rate. However, I'm on watchOS4 and I only see the picture of the red heart. Is any one else getting their heart rate BPM? Do I need to switch that on somehow?
 
It does display your last measured heart rate (on both S3 and S2 watch, I can confirm), but not on all of the complications. You need to be using this on a Modular Large, or Utilitarian Large complication to see it working. On all of the smaller complications, you only see the heart icon. I think the reason they decided to make it this way is because the information of when the displayed heart rate was measured is pretty necessary for a feature like this where it's not measured continuously, and there's only enough space on those two complications to do this.

Otherwise you'd have people potentially freaking out seeing just the number like 150 there, even though they stopped running 5 minutes ago - not knowing that the displayed number was actually measured maybe 7 minutes ago.
 
Otherwise you'd have people potentially freaking out seeing just the number like 150 there, even though they stopped running 5 minutes ago - not knowing that the displayed number was actually measured maybe 7 minutes ago.
I get the logic, but there are other ways to handle this. Perhaps if the last measured HR is less than one minute old, it's displayed in bright text. Then the HR gets progressively dimmer until a new HR measurement is taken.

As it is, wasting a "large" complication spot just to see the last heart rate is disappointing. Cardiogram has a complication that shows the last HR, but it's wildly inconsistent ... to the point of being useless.

Perhaps, in combination with the new recovery HR feature, your scenario wouldn't be as much of a problem. The AW keeps the HR sensor on for about 3 minutes after a workout to measure your recovery HR, so as long as you're relatively heart healthy, you wouldn't see 150 on the complication.
 
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I agree that it’s disappointing to have to use the large complication. I’d prefer to use the big one for something like news or weather. For me, Heart rate is a secondary piece of info that should fall to a small complication.
 
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