WatchOS 10 makes playing music on watch so much more tedious

Not rare. It's just really difficult for a community of people dealing with crappy new watch functionality to come together quickly. I'm having the EXACT same problem on my Apple Watch. If I ever needed an excuse to not go for a run now, it's my Apple Watch and the ten minutes I spend before every run battling its desire to play music on my iPhone (BTW, out of all the features on my Apple Watch, the thing I least need to do is use it to control the music on the phone that's literally in my other hand). And there's no easy nor obvious way to switch it back to my BT earphones (which are already paired. Have already been unpaired and re-paired. So don't send me that link, please.).

In addition to borking the watch so it plays to the phone by default, the other thing that's happened is that playlists no longer continue where I left off the day before. I don't know about the other runners here, but I keep five or six really big playlists loaded to my watch at all times. When I start a run, I start up a playlist and hit "shuffle" (which is also now buried multiple taps into the system). When I finish the run, I hit "pause." When I run the next day, my watch used to remember right where I left off, and would keep playing. Now I've got to start the playlist over every single time, leading to lots of repeats of songs.

I don't know that anyone's suggesting a bug (though it could be). I'm sure some developer thought this new way was oodles better than the old way -- the way we've been doing it for years and years and years. It is not better. It's dumb.

I have precisely the same problem! It is SO ANNOYING. I have found that I need to power down my iPhone before selecting the music to play on my Watch and that stops the phone from being in the loop. I wish I could go back to previous Watch OS.

I ONLY listen to music that is on my Watch, never on my phone. I listen when at the gym and don't even have my phone on my person, its in my gym bag.

I agree with the OP. Whatever they changed. It's unintuitive. My scenario is I like to play a downloaded playlist while I run. Since IOS 10, about half the time I leave my house for a run the music cuts off in the first minute because it's playing from the internet instead of from my downloaded music and I've run out of my WiFi range. I never had this issue before IOS 10.

Update: I have submitted a bug report (for the watch insisting to connect with the iPhone iso using the watch music app) and a usability complaint (for the not-resume ‘feature’ of the watchOS music app) to Apple. Please do the same!

I’m as irritated as you are by watchOS 10. Same exact thing - and I get what you’re saying. Maybe others aren’t trying to play music on a run, just control music with the watch? I don’t see how they don’t have the same issues. Apple needs to fix this asap. It was so easy before!

I've griped about this before, but the situation got taken to a whole new level last week. I went to go for a run, fired up my watch, jumped through the "control other devices," scroll through device, "play on other device," "play on Apple Watch" hoops, then paused the music until I could get out the door. In the time it took me to get to the back door, my watch decided that, no, it was going to play music on my phone, not on my watch. I went back to the phone, and there was the music playing. I put the phone in airplane mode, made sure BT and WiFi were turned off, then jumped through the play-on-watch hoops again. Music started. I paused the music. Got to the back porch and hit play. And there it was playing music on my phone again. The only way I could successfully play from my watch to my Shokz was to turn the phone off.

It's bad, but it's not normally this bad. And I will remain completely confused about why I have to click so **** many things to get to "play on Apple watch." When I click the little icon in the upper right corner, it sure seems like "Play on Apple Watch" should be the first thing in the list. They must be convinced that playing on other devices -- TVs, speakers, etc. -- are what people want to do, ignoring those of us who want to use it to run.

Yes i think moving over to using Spotify using App on the Apple Watch is the quickest fix for this issue….. and avoiding minutes of frustration before a run trying to get the Apple Music App to work on your wireless headphones.

Apple usability bugs drive customers over to Spotify App…. sounds like an urgent fix is needed.

I have the same problem plus an additional one - I manually manage my music on my iPhone from my Mac and I used to sync 2-3 playlists to my watch for work outs etc.

Now watchOS 10 shows every single song/playlist on my iPhone on the music app and not just the playlists stored locally! So when I’m about to go for a run I have to search through a ton of music which isn’t even really there to find the playlist stored locally!

the watchOS music app used to just only show music that was stored locally, or at the very least had an option where it said music on watch music on iPhone. This latest watchOS has been terrible, it’s basically bricked my s5 watch, everything is so slow is almost unusable… don’t even get me started on trying to use apple pay it takes an age for that to ever work!

I hope those at Apple Are Paying Attention This update has me wanting to drop Apple Watch and Apple Music.

I enjoy using my watch with my teaching specifically the Bluetooth with my speaker for music. Apple Music. I have never had a problem with the Bluetooth dropping. Since the last update Bluetooth drops randomly often sometimes 3 times within 5 min. Also the music app does not pick up the speaker and instead plays music on my iPhone. Very annoying. Never did this before the update. So I now spend minutes going through screens and playlists until I get the choose an external speaker option. In the past when I choose it just started to play. Now I still have to go back and hit play again. I also used “now playing” which was very convenient. However now it is useless it shows Apple Watch and iPhone and neither box when touched goes anywhere. Very disappointed this last update making my watch not a great option for work now and will likely drop Apple Music as my paid music service as a result. If this doesn’t change Apple Watch will no longer be my choice.

I have the same issue hockeybrian mentioned in his initial post. It’s how I found this post (searching for the problem to see if I was doing something wrong). It wasn’t easy in watchOS 9 to get my watch to stream to my AirPods without bringing the phone into the picture, but it was more doable than with watchOS 10 (I didn’t do it often but if I remember correctly you could select an album that’s been downloaded to the watch and then select AirPods as an output device and it would play from the watch to the AirPods). Now in watchOS 10, even when selecting an album I’ve downloaded to the watch and selecting AirPods as the output device, it uses the phone as the driver, and the watch basically as a remote. When I walked away from the house out of the AirPods’ range of the phone it stopped playing, and I could then get the AirPods to play music from the watch. Even when I turned Bluetooth off on the phone (back in range of all three devices), when I played a song from downloaded-to-my-watch content, it played it from the phones speaker (since the phone was no longer connected to the AirPods w Bluetooth disabled ... but apparently still connected to the watch?) - watchOS 10 treats the music app on the watch as a remote for the phone.

I’m with hockeybrian - there’s no easy way, and I’d even go so far as to say watchOS 10 almost seems to be designed to interfere with the ability to play music from the watch to the AirPods without bringing the phone into the loop unless it’s turned off or out of range of the first two devices.

So frustrated about this. Considering the importance of running as use-case for Apple Watch, it’s almost unbelievable that they shipped it this way.

Until they fix it, here is the best work-around I’ve seen:

• Use the Listen Now option, as described in this guide. It’s totally unintuitive, but for whatever reason this will always play music on your Apple Watch.
• Music will now be playing from your Apple Watch. If you want to listen to something else you can browse to it and play it without having to go through the whole three-dots/airplay/bluetooth madness.