Taptic Different from App to App?

With the current 1.x watchOS, developers do not have access to the taptic engine (or other features of Apple Watch such as the Digital Crown, or microphone). This means that third-party apps such as Gmail and Facebook will not be able to give you taptic feedback.

In watchOS 2.x which is currently in beta, developers can access these features of the Watch. So look for an updated Gmail app that will give you that feedback after watchOS 2.0 is released in a few months.

Fella.

 

Yes - for now, only expect tactic feedback from the native apps. I'm not sure if they all use it, but the majority do.

And yes, from my experience when the paired iPhone is unlocked, notifications for mail/SMS, etc. only appear on the phone. I only see notifications on my Watch when the phone is locked. That's my understanding, anyway - someone who knows better may correct me...

Fella.

 

Are you sure that's 100% across the board? I ask because I'm on 1.01, and my Craftsman Garage Opener definitely has haptics when I receive a notification about the door being opened, because I feel the watch buzz me everytime I leave home.

 

I can definitively say that third-party apps can give taptic feedback. I have Cloudmagic (an email client) and WeChat (a messenger client similar to WhatsApp) and whenever I get a notification, my watch definitely gives me taptic feedback to alert me.

 

I can confirm all my apps that send notifications work on Apple Watch and give haptic feedback. Maybe the OP means the "rhythm" of the taps....

 

Hey all,

As I mentioned, third party devs only have access to the taptic engine from watchOS 2.x. The taptic feedback you are seeing comes courtesy of Apple's push notification system; push notifications or alerts can/will produce taptic feedback depending on the settings of your Watch. So apps that generate push notifications will benefit from that.

With the watchOS 2, developers will be able to directly access and manipulate the taptic engine from their app to provide a more engaging user experience. Apologies if the wording of my previous post was misleading!

Fella.

 

Push notifications were introduced by Apple in one of the iOS releases a few years back - iOS 4 I think. Apple introduced it as a way of improving performance on iOS devices, and as a way of standardising the way that alerts are delivered to the apps that you have running on your device. If Apple didn't implement push notifications as a 'standard' way of generating alerts, each app would have to find its own way of doing this which would result in apps that were more 'buggy', more confusing to configure, and that would probably have a bad impact on battery life.

The way it works is that a developer working on an app that needs to tell a user when something has new happened (such as a new Facebook 'like', a new Whatsapp message, or a new email) can register his app with Apple's push notification service. When the new event happens, (for example, you got a new email) the developer's 'back end' system pushes an message not to your device directly, but to Apple's push notification service saying "MacLija got a new email". The push notification service then delivers the "New email" alert to your device, and you get the little red dot on the app icon. This means it's not the Facebook app (or whatever) that actually produces the alert on your device - it's Apple' Push Notification system that actually does that.

When you install an app to your iPhone which is capable of sending push notifications, you normally get a message when the app installs: "<app name> would like to send you Push Notifications", and you can choose "OK" or "Don't Allow" at that point. You can choose to mirror these notification settings (so your Watch will produce alerts in the same way as your phone), or not by opening the Apple Watch app on your phone, tapping Notifications, and then enabling or disabling push notifications for each app with the sider.

When the settings are configured, any push notification that is sent to your phone while your phone is locked and not in use, is then pushed by your phone on to your Watch.

If your phone is in use, then the phone displays the push notification and does not push it on to your Watch as it assumes you have just seen the alert on your phone.

Fella.

 

No, they're not the same, but they are related. Push notifications on the Watch use the taptic engine to tell the user when they arrive.

Fella.