Apple Watch Fitness Regressions
In episode 680 of ATP, at about 6:12 in, Marco Arment goes off on watchOS 26’s fitness app and trashes all the changes. And I couldn’t agree more with him.
I thought it was just me who hated all the changes, and the slow animations, and the workout picker. It’s such a regression I don’t even know where to start.
[…]
If I could downgrade my watch safely, I would.
Previously:
Update (2026-03-18): Kaveh:
They are so bad, I have no idea how any competent UX designer could have okayed this, and I’m not a competent UX designer by trade.
It used to be trivial to start your working deterministically with a tap or two, now you have to stop your workout entirely to start the bleeping watch workout. I really want to understand how this got approved and shipped at a company that [used to] pride itself on UI/UX design.
I guess I’m not the only one bothered by the changes to the watch workout app. Sometimes when you change the UI just for the sake of changing stuff, you make it worse.
Do you think a major feature of watchOS 27 will be that pushing the “play” button on a Workout actually starts the workout, or do you think Apple is going to hold that back for watchOS 28?
Update (2026-03-20): See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.
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A B- is wildly over generous to Apple’s software quality. I’ve been dealing with bugs that make me think a D is too generous
This one is a bit of a teapot tempest. The app is worse now, sure, but it works (except when it asks me to sign in to my Apple account in settings 1.5 miles into a run, blocking the exercise UI, but that was happening before 26).
And it’s not like there aren’t options on top of options if you hate the Fitness app. Try RunKeeper. Or Pedometer++. Or Paddle Buddy. Or…
I mean you could take the Podcasts app apart too… so many bad choices in that app. Especially if you don’t like reading a transcription every time you open the app while listening. Sheesh, annoying.
But that’s all subjective stuff. Sure Fitness’ start arrow is dumb. But I think it’s a symptom of the new workout choice widget… you can’t click the exercise type icon to start b/c now you can touch the workout icon to scroll. Subjectively bad, but internally consistent and still a competent app.
There’s so, so much worse going on in Apple land to waste time on an app that works. 2¢.
It's not just the Workouts app though. WatchOS 9 was great and ever since then they have purposely made it worse and worse. The Dock worked great for me and they just removed it with no replacement. I used to be able to read notifications, nope now they're tiny truncated bubbles. Even this Series 10 runs like crap on version 27. Everything is slower and takes more interaction than it used to.
And this is all completely self inflicted. If they had literally not updated the watch in two years I would be happier.
The watchOS 26 Workout app seems symptomatic of development and testing carried out primarily in the watchOS simulator with a mouse, and at five times the size the app would be on a watch. That said however, the app’s new integration with the phone is far better than previous versions. You can now configure custom workouts with complex reps and work / recovery steps on the phone, which is far easier than doing it on the watch. Also, being able to start and stop workouts from the phone is brilliant, especially in winter when my watch is covered under multiple layers of clothing. The problem is for runs and cycles, I usually not taking my phone with me which is when I feel the friction of the new UI.
