I cannot change watch face by swiping after upgrading to WatchOS 10

I sympathize with the person who said Apple deleted the "entire user experience," even though that is overstatement. Swiping between faces is an extremely central part of the user experience. My watch is actually five neighbopring watch faces. The center one is simple with no complications and probably color coordinated with the band. The two off to each side are information rich. Full of those ugly info-speedometers and such. I keep these busy looking screens out of sight. Where once I needed only to swipe, read, and swipe back, now to check the air quality, I have to long-press, swipe, tap, read, long-press, swipe back to my home face, and tap again (and feel mad at Apple instead of merely curious about the air quality). This takes even more steps if the info I seek is two screens over.

The loss of this feature is not something I will likely get used to since I do this action many times a day. I don't want to feel mad many times a day, so I will be switching back to my analog watches unless Apple comes to it's senses and fixes what they broke. I'll keep the Apple Watch on a charger to keep the battery healthy and occasionally use it (to the extent one would an analog watch). It'll be in the rotation of my many watches, instead of being on my wrist all the time. The watch isn't a critical piece of the ecosystem like the iPhone, it's just handy - until it isn't.

What is needed is an option in settings. Lock the faces to avoid accidental swiping or free the faces as before.

https://apple.com/feedback

Simply press and hold the current watch face - from there you can edit the current face, swipe right to change to a different face in your face gallery, swipe left to add a new watch face. Apple did not remove this watch function - just gave it more functionality!

If I'm limited to only changing my watch face once an hour, it's not worth owning.

I would never suggest your methods or preferences are bad or wrong. However, I feel pretty strongly that however you are using your watch is not an efficient method for me. On an average day, I interact with my Apple Watch maybe a total of 10 minutes a day (more on weekends). Those 10 minutes are made up of looking at a face, swiping, looking at a face, swiping, opening an app, exiting, swiping. Etcetera. With these changes, this daily interaction would increase to well over an hour.

I've been using OS 10 since July. Trust me, I tried. And I've submitted over a dozen feedback reports. It's slow. It's burdensome. It gets in my way. I would much sooner go back to an analog watch than live with OS 10. The problem is that I LOVE my Apple Watch. I love leaving my phone at home most of the time I leave the house. There's so much this device has to offer and I rely on it. I really do not want to go back to carrying my phone around everywhere I go.

I've also explained like this; I bought a car from Apple and have been using it to my delight for the past seven years. Today, Apple has handed me a key that I now need to access the key to operate the vehicle.

I'm passionate about this device. And the ability to interact with it the way I do is practically the entire reason why I love it.

This is literally like disabling the iPhone’s ability to swipe to change home screens. Sure, technology progresses, usually for the better, and usually not with handicapping the entire user experience overnight.

I don’t disagree with you. Of course if the Apple Watch remains convoluted and burdensome, I’m choosing not to be wedded to the eco system. There’s nothing else to discuss about this. The device has been updated in multiple ways to hinder operation. This is an observable, repeatable, and documented scientific fact.

I also use the swipe left and right all the time on my watch. It is very sad that this feature is now lost. Yes there are other ways of doing this but they take longer and require more interactions with the watch. (Time wasted)

This makes more friction for using my watch and makes it less useful.

It would be different if there was a way to set what you want your swipe actions to do but that does not seem like an option.

Very disappointing.

I sent feedback to Apple using the link. But it is still unfortunate. Sadly, I updated my Apple Watch and it got as system that is less useful to me and now is worse.

(I have not commented on other changes in OS 10 that reduce or complicate access: e.g how changing the location accessing the control center (formerly swipe up, but now the side button) means retraining multiple years of muscle memory or how the changes in the way that the activity monitor complication is presented now makes it much harder to check (formerly touching the complication showed a single long screen but under OS 10, it is six (!) separate screens).)

Not once have I ever accidentally swiped off the screen I was using. Crippling this feature in favour of a long-hold and swipe SEVERELY impacts the utility of the device. I had 5 faces set up for different purposes and swiping between them was extremely useful. The new approach is simply unusable by comparison. The solution would have been to allow people to lock to a particular face rather than completely cripple the UI for everyone.

I think what you're missing here is the observation that Apple is not making intelligent decisions when it comes to the experience of all users.

They have crippled the operating system rendering the device useless for the sake of appeasing a minor annoyance.

There are other ways to resolve minor annoyances that do not cripple the underlying operation of the device. I know that. I presume you know that. Why is it that this multi-trillion dollar company is incapable of knowing what we know?

They should have added a lock-face function either in the settings or in the Edit menu. It's a simple change that everyone would be happy to see. Instead, they (Tim Cook and his multi-trillion dollar corporation) made a decision to render more-difficult-to-use a product people have spent hundreds of dollars on to make their lives more efficient, more informed, and more connected.

You and your accidental face changing friends are more than right to want a way to prevent accidents from happening. No one disagrees that your special wrists are capable of doing things that others have never experienced for nearly a decade. But do you feel that this change should come at the cost of rendering a device more complicated and practically useless for millions of others?

It's difficult to overstate how monumental this decision is.

“Better than ever”? I think not. For those of us who use multiple faces with multiple complications, it’s less user friendly. Dare I say, less intuitive! This is a step backwards. Its not Apples style. Frustrating. It’s like changing everything we knew and loved and forcing us to use something all together different that is by far worse than before, and, will not be more intuitive with repeated use. Will only always cause further frustrations.

So, Apple takes something simple like swiping left or right to change the watch face and adds an additional step of having to go into the face set up like you are going to change complications to swipe between faces. Come on man! What was wrong with the simple swipe?

Completely agree. Watch OS 10 is, by far, the worst release ever for usability. That simple swipe was so convenient, replaced by a long press and swipe which is completely unintuitive. I hate this release so much I am very seriously considering not using the watch any more.

More than 80% of the time I’m using my watch I’m changing the face to get information from it. I have a hard time understanding how people use the device without doing this. What’s the point if not to get information? How do you get information from more than one or two apps at a time?

Thanks for that nugget. Now I can change watch faces again, but I think they messed the user experience up. Like other users, I like to use multiple watch faces and “press, hold, swipe” is not as quick or easy as just swiping left or right. I’d prefer that they add an option to lock the face if people were bothered by inadvertently changing faces.

Then the fix should be to allow those people the ability to lock the screen to one of their choosing. The solution is NOT to cripple the user interface to the point that the device no longer serves the purpose it was intended to do.

I have owned an Apple Watch since the first one was released. Not one time in the seven years that this function has existed have I EVER accidentally swiped to a different watch face. And, if I had, the solution to that is to simply flick your finger to select the preferred face.

Everyone is well aware that now to change a watch face you must invoke the Edit interface. For those who use the device to review the data presented on 4, 5, 6 different watch faces at a moment's glance, this has turned a two second interaction into something that takes well over ten seconds. This new burden that people face dozens of times a day make the device practically useless. The operating system is now standing in the way of accomplishing the primary purpose of the device.

Handicapping the operating system to solve an occasional mild annoyance is NOT the solution.