Sorry if someone already posted something about this. I didn't see anything.
Has anyone noticed whether or not Siri is any more reliable on the Apple Watch with OS 2.2, especially over wifi? Failure to dictate anything when I'm replying to a message is one thing that really drives me nuts and tempts me to stop using the watch. It just "spins" whenever I'm on wifi trying to use Siri. So frustrating. I can deal with a little lag on somethings, but not failed to work at all.
So, on initial update, yes Siri was very fast indeed and then it seemed to revert to it's original slow self, even after a reset.
Then yesterday I did something and it's all snappy again and I've formed a bit of a theory.
I got sick of all the useless notifications and general clutter on my watch screen so I removed almost all of my watch apps, and I had quite a few. I removed all of the Delta, American Airlines etc. and basically anything that I didn't use every day or wanted to be notified by, such as Dark Sky.
I ended up with..
2 banking apps
Dark Sky
Geocaching
1Password
Index Card
Star Walk
Star Walk 2
Twitter
BBC News
Particularly I took of all the things (just from the watch) like Google Maps, Instagram, eBay, Amazon, Shazam, SoundHound.
What do you know, everything is running fast and continues to. I can even 'Hey Siri' and launch straight into asking it a question and it works.
My theory goes that the OS on the watch tries to optimise the load of the apps, and this goes some way to explain the lengthy boot time which (possibly subjectively) seems to have also shortened for me, and uses this to ensure that the apps load quickly when selected from the home screen.
It may also be the case that it doesn't flag an app to be reloaded on boot until it has been loaded at least once and that a Watch OS update clears all the apps back to not loading.
So,
a) There may be some form of background scheduling element associated with these apps.
b) There may be memory pressure from having them loaded up front that means that memory needs to be reclaimed for new buffers to be created to handle things like voice capture etc.
My main obersvations are, having done this,
1. Siri is now a useful tool.
2. The icon screen is now fast.
3. Apps (the ones I left) seem actually to be snappier.
It actually feels like the Watch has enough power to do what I actually need it to do again.
Given that I didn't have any grumbles about any of these performance issues until the introduction of native apps on WatchOS I think that's another possible indicator of the cause.
-Andy
