in fairness i've only had the watch for a day, so this is hot take initial impression.
coming from a fitbit, i had next to no customization yet still found it displayed the pertient info i wanted in an easily glanceable, straightforward way.
trying to replicate something similar on the apple watch feels surprisingly difficult.
you can have a really simple watch face where its just the time, but then any other info you want is buried in having to click around and mess with the watch way more than i want to.
you can have a geeky watch face filled with complication gizmos that feel like information overload and not easily glanceable.
you can try to really dial in the customization to get just the right balance of information, but run into frustrating things where the information you want to display is tied to some other random asethetic element that you might not want. most notably, i can get just the right information density/readability from the 'motion' watch face, but that layout of information is inextricably tied to having a giant distracting jellyfish animating behind all of it. there is literally no way to display that particular layout of info with just a simple black background.
in general, coming from a fitbit, the two glanceable pieces of info i appreciated were step count and heart rate. and apple seems to want to dissuade you from having either. for steps you literally have to have a 3rd party app installed to display as a complication, despite the health app natively tracking it. and heart rate can be added as a complication to almost any watch face, but insists on being an informationless icon rather than a simple number in almost every watch face. you might argue the battery can't handle updating that info... except it will happily show you this info on some watch faces, either with a bunch of extra bar graph info cluttering the screen, or watch faces where you have to make some ridiculous choice like seeing your heart rate or the current date, but not both.
it just feels kinda bizarre how many arbitrary restriction you have to try to juggle.
coming from a fitbit, i had next to no customization yet still found it displayed the pertient info i wanted in an easily glanceable, straightforward way.
trying to replicate something similar on the apple watch feels surprisingly difficult.
you can have a really simple watch face where its just the time, but then any other info you want is buried in having to click around and mess with the watch way more than i want to.
you can have a geeky watch face filled with complication gizmos that feel like information overload and not easily glanceable.
you can try to really dial in the customization to get just the right balance of information, but run into frustrating things where the information you want to display is tied to some other random asethetic element that you might not want. most notably, i can get just the right information density/readability from the 'motion' watch face, but that layout of information is inextricably tied to having a giant distracting jellyfish animating behind all of it. there is literally no way to display that particular layout of info with just a simple black background.
in general, coming from a fitbit, the two glanceable pieces of info i appreciated were step count and heart rate. and apple seems to want to dissuade you from having either. for steps you literally have to have a 3rd party app installed to display as a complication, despite the health app natively tracking it. and heart rate can be added as a complication to almost any watch face, but insists on being an informationless icon rather than a simple number in almost every watch face. you might argue the battery can't handle updating that info... except it will happily show you this info on some watch faces, either with a bunch of extra bar graph info cluttering the screen, or watch faces where you have to make some ridiculous choice like seeing your heart rate or the current date, but not both.
it just feels kinda bizarre how many arbitrary restriction you have to try to juggle.
