I’ve been pretty neutral about the changes on watchOS 10. I understood that people don’t like changes -
but it’s been 2 months now and I still try to bring up the control center the old way, I still try to access my most recently used apps the old way and I’m still annoyed by having submenus everywhere where watchOS 9 was straightforward with everything. watchOS 10 is the most unintuitive Apple experience I ever had.
Old top menu bar, one line leaving space for the actual content
New top menu bar with huge buttons at the top, pushing down the actual content
Probably the worst part on my 40mm SE is that the colorful backgrounds made all app icons on watch faces smaller (there has recently been a post about this) and I keep missing icons when clicking them. I sometimes need to click an icon 4 times until it registers, along with the colorful backgrounds and unnecessarily huge flashy other buttons this feels like a $50 knockoff Watch to me now.
Also what did they think when changing the menu bar at the top? It used to be one small line (picture 1) but now on my 40mm Watch about 1 fourth of the screen is covered by each app’s title or clock (picture 2). I know what app I’m in, I don’t need half the screen (exaggerating yes) covered to be reminded of the app I’m using.
watchOS 10 must’ve been designed by someone who doesn’t really use their Apple Watch much I assume. I’m not blaming them, everyone can make mistakes when the goal was progress but it’s not like a mistake has to be set in stone. Just roll it back or give us a choice between design and functionality - I personally prefer functionality, it’s not like watchOS 9 was so ugly that it needed a re-design to begin with.
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Hated it until I realised where the recent apps shortcut was then I was happy again. I like the UI change, just would have been nice to have a quick tutorial to show where things had moved.
I cannot use the workout app. Absolutely destroyed it
I reluctantly got used to the control centre. I never use the widgets at all. I mostly hate the full screen apps, especially the Activities app which was such a regressive change. Double tap is nice but undercooked and needs a lot of improvement - it should open the notifications list, not the pointless widgets area.
Love the improvements…so….no
yeah its bad, timer complications does not work most of the time either
I do
10 isn’t perfect but I still prefer it over 9. And I’ve gotten used to the different functions the buttons do at this point.
Yes, most people agree, OS10 is trash
No – most people complaining about it online agree. No surprise there. I’m sure the vast majority of people either like it, are fine with it, or don’t care.
I don’t get the fuss, I like it. Is the implication that Apple shouldn’t ever change the way things are operated because people like OP can’t learn to press a button after a couple of months?
You’re not alone, the best we can do is give Apple our feedback on this, I totally hated the Touch Bar and ports on MacBooks pros, most people didn’t like it either and Apple had to go back to old design. With WatchOS 10 they also tried to fix something that wasn’t broken, we must be able to customise how the watch behaves, if your side button malfunctions you’re left without control center
Yeah the touch bar is fucking useless. I programmed it to simply show the normal keys. Now went with a MacBook Air instead just to avoid the TouchBar, haven’t ever used it for anything except for showing the keys it replaced
Autocorrect was a cool feature. I think that’s the only thing I like about it.
Interesting, I always found active autocorrect annoying on computers. I’m fine with how it is in Chrome, just marking potentially wrong words instead of turning each “fuck” into “duck”
It’s quite nice when you’re paying for something. But yeah, otherwise I’d rather have the normal keys
What do you mean paying? Do you mean Touch ID? All MacBooks have Touch ID regardless of the Touch Bar, you don’t need the Touch Bar for that
Yes but it’s nice how it displays the amount right next to where you have to touch, with an arrow pointing to the Touch ID sensor. It’s a nice touch to have one last check how much you’re paying right there next to where you need to put your finger.
Customization is definitely the key here. It’s anathema to how Apple does things usually, but watches are such a personal item that you use constantly through the day that it’s necessary when you make big changes like this.
Did they change the ports?
HDMI, SD card reader and MagSafe charging port were added back
It works the way it worked before. I guess some Karens just want to be outraged so they make stuff up or hit themselves in the head until they come up with something to post.
It works the way it worked before
Oh so the Apple presentation of the new watchOS was just a fever dream everyone was having at the same time worldwide? What an idiotic statement sorry
Seems fine for me. The only thing I would like to see a change is on the stacks. It has the time at the top of it which isn’t neccasary becasue as you scroll down the time appears anyway.
Yeah that’s pretty dumb. I wish you at least had the chance to adjust whether it’s digital or analogue. I’d actually kinda appreciate having quick access to the precise time when using an analogue watch face.
Really I just wish that you could change the entire stack for each face. Customization in general is the big issue with the OS, honestly, and you really feel it when you lose the ability to do something on a device as small/limited as a watch. A lot of the changes here should be things you can opt in or out of.
This might be useful to you. I bought it yesterday. It’s a digital time complication for 99p
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/timeglance-complication/id1531068181
I find the “Smart” Stack anything but. After sucking my battery dry with the weather widget (took me a week from the RC to stumble on that) to absolute agony trying to change any features because maybe my fingers are too big. I went back to my usual faces with complications that displayed the information I needed in less than a second.
Sadly, that left me either the problem of wasting my time to simply swipe left or right to go from a pretty analog watch face to Infograph with my nice 8 complications, glance at it, and swipe back to my pretty analog face. Total time in under 2 seconds, making it simple, intuitive, and helpful. But nope, press for 2 seconds, looks through the little watch face icons, select it, read it for a second, then spend 2 seconds holding that face to go back into edit mode to select the other face. If people were having too much trouble with accidental swipes from clothing (I mostly wear dress shirts, yet only happened maybe 2 or 3 times in two years of daily wear, add a no swipe toggle in control panel, and no more accidental swipes. That group is happy, and I’m happy having my swipe function to use as I see fit (my needs and moods change throughout the day, so no, focus modes won’t help).
The list goes on and on of unintuitive changes made for the sake of change, not improvement in actual use. To take a functional and intuitive UX and fiddle with it quite literally just for the sake of it shows design teams struggling to find helpful new features, so just move things around and make it feel different. That goal they met.
The only real attempt at improving utility and speed of feature management was double tap. Rebranded from accessibility features, and not exactly enough of a breakthrough to make me rush to the counter to trade in my S7 for an S9, and hope one out of three double pinches achieves the command I meant to enter, instead of a single nose tap.
The odd thing is that the UX was far from perfect even before 10. There were plenty of things that could have been done. The home screen in particular, which has barely been messed with. No ability to set favorites in list view to sit at the top for easy access is a ridiculous oversight. You can’t hide apps you don’t want on your home screen, or sort them in any way, let alone organize them into folders. The best you can do is remove the app altogether. The app cluster view is really cluttered and hard to distinguish what you are looking for. To me that seems like it should be a far higher priority than redoing perfectly usable bits of UI.
I didn’t put the watch face swipe in my post because I think some people simply accidentally swiped all the time but your suggestion making it an option sounds perfect
I got a Series 8 this summer and it has been stuck on 9.6.2. There a notification nearly every day that says it’s going to update at night, but never does. Maybe it’s not a bad thing after hearing all the feedback
Have you updated your iphone to ios 17? Mine is still on 16 I don’t get notifications on watch os 9
You can’t update the watch until you update your paired phone
Idk, I like it quite a bit
Took me a bit over a week and everything is normal to me now. I’m actually quite happy with how everything works and I really wasn’t sure initially especially with not everyone liking OS 10 and I’m a big fan of the app redesigns.