I’ll be honest: I’m a complete Apple Watch fanboy. I’ve been using Apple’s wearable for close to a decade, and I went from reluctant skeptic to total convert the minute I first borrowed a friend’s Watch to see what all the fuss was about. The device is, in my opinion, the best smartwatch money can buy.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, though. There are several aspects of Apple’s device that I’m less keen on, from the single-day battery life to the eye-watering price of its straps. And there are two Apple Watch annoyances that top my list of problems: the Wrist Flick gesture and Live Activities. Both are consistent sources of frustration in my day-to-day usage.
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1. Wrist Flick
Yet in practice, I’ve found this gesture to be frustratingly flaky. Sometimes it just doesn’t register my action, leaving my repeatedly rotating my wrist as the notification stays firmly in place, mocking my plaintive irritation. Other times, I’ll raise my wrist to check the alert, but my Watch interprets this action itself as a wrist flick gesture, leading to the notification being dismissed when I in fact wanted to read it.
In other words, I often find that wrist flick doesn’t work when it should and does work when it shouldn’t.
Adding to the problem is its inconsistency. Wrist Flick is not always an issue for me – indeed, sometimes it works perfectly. Most of the time, raising my wrist to check a message does not accidentally invoke the gesture. Yet occasionally it does, with watchOS maddeningly misreading my intention.
That makes it very hard to determine if I’m doing something wrong or if the gesture is just a little buggy. I can never tell when it’s going to work and when it’s not.
Despite that, I love the idea behind it. Like watchOS’s Double Tap gesture, Wrist Flick is a great addition for those times when you’ve only got one free hand and still want to be able to perform an action on your Watch. Ultimately, though, it feels like it needs a little more time in the oven.
Hopefully, Apple will fix it up at WWDC. I don’t need a full-blown wrist flick overhaul. Just a little attention to make it more consistent.
There are reports that iOS 27 – coming at WWDC – will be focused much more on performance and stability improvements rather than new features. Hopefully that applies to watchOS 27, too, with wrist flick getting a spot of much-needed love.
Live Activities
While I’m happy that my Apple Watch can forward texts from my iPhone, record my workouts and start timers on the go, much of the time I just want to use it as a regular, everyday clock. Yet there’s one feature that frequently gets in the way of this: Live Activities.
If you haven’t used Live Activities in watchOS yet, the feature basically works like an automated mini app that mirrors ongoing activities from your other Apple devices. So, if you’re playing music in Spotify on your Mac, for instance, you’ll see a little Spotify ‘now playing’ widget appear on your Apple Watch.
The idea is to give you a way to control what you’re doing on your other devices without having to be physically sat in front of them. In the Spotify example, you could pause your music from your wrist, even if you’re some distance away from your Mac.
That sounds like a pretty handy feature, and it frequently is. But my problem is with how Live Activities tend to take over your watch face – often without you even realizing.
I use an Apple Watch face with four of my favorite complications around its edge: the date, my Watch’s battery level, the temperature, and my activity rings. Tapping one of those complications brings up more detailed information. For that reason, I like to have my Watch face displaying most of the time so that I can quickly use these complications in a frictionless way.
The widgets launched by Live Activities, though, interfere with that. With a Live Activity taking over my Watch display, I have to dismiss it to get to my complications, then bring it back to get the added functionality granted by Live Activities. It’s disruptive for the way I want to work.
As well as that, Live Activities launch themselves automatically – you don’t bring them up manually. Because of that, I often forget they’re there. I’ll raise my wrist to check the time or tap a complication, only to find that the information I need is obscured by something that’s not even happening on my Apple Watch, but is instead taking place on one of my other devices. That makes it feel like my Watch has prioritized something of less importance and relevance to me.
I’m aware that I can disable Live Activities on my Apple Watch – I wrote a how-to guide on disabling the feature, in fact – but the problem is that your only options are severely limited. Essentially, you can either switch off Live Activities entirely or leave them as they are. Yes, you can disable Live Activities on a per-app basis, but you can’t really change how they work. It’s an either-or, on-off situation, with little middle ground.
I would prefer to have an option that sits somewhere between full-blown screen takeover territory and a complete absence of Live Activities. And I’ve got an idea of how that could work.
In fact, that idea comes straight from Apple in the form of Smart Stack hints. These are tiny icons that appear on your Watch when Apple thinks you might want them, such as a workout suggestion right when you’re about to start your daily 8am jog. It’s all arranged through harnessing artificial intelligence to predict what you might want to do with your Watch.
Why not take out the AI guesswork and expand these hints to Live Activities? When you start playing music on your Mac, your Watch could show a little Spotify icon at the bottom of your screen. One tap and the full Live Activity would launch. That would be a good compromise, enabling you to still get Live Activity functionality without the feature dominating your display.
Now, before you tell me this already exists, I know that there’s a toggle called Auto-Launch Live Activities buried in the Apple Watch’s Settings app, and disabling this stops Live Activities starting by themselves. But if you do this, the app that would otherwise trigger the Live Activity is restricted to a tiny icon at the top of your screen – one which I struggle to hit half the time. Smart Stack hints, on the other hand, are a touch larger and therefore much easier to press.
As well as that, the existing situation – tapping the minute icon at the top of your display – launches the full-blown Watch app. A Smart Stack hint, meanwhile, fires up a Live Activity, which often preserves important watch face information like the clock. Personally, I prefer the latter.
Making that idea a reality is something I’d love to see at WWDC. Apple has already laid the groundwork in the form of Smart Stack hints. Now it just needs to open the system up to Live Activities and tweak the feature.
And who knows, perhaps Apple will come up with something even better. For a company well known for its intuitive software, I’m sure it can rustle up something impressive. I’ll be watching with bated breath.
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