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:
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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.
