WatchOS 10 makes playing music on watch so much more tedious

Many of us are dealing with the annoying tendency for our Apple Watches to start playing music on our phones instead of our headphones/earbuds as we are walking out the door for a workout. 

Then, we waste 10 minutes going through hoops to get the watch to play through our headphones, including disconnecting and reconnecting our headphones via Bluetooth, and powering off our phones. 

Both of these should be unnecessary, and I seem to have to do them every few weeks or months at inconvenient times. Frustrating.

Has anyone found a way to stop the watch from playing through the phone?

Indeed, I often take a walk without my phone but then it becomes almost impossible to force using my watch playlist. The main issue is that you cannot in any case distinguish what’s on the iPhone from what’s on your watch. Even though you select « Downloaded » it keeps feeding from the main source.

The Apple watch should have a manual toggle iPhone>Watch. Choose the source to force the transfer, do not take that decision for me please, let me free!

On the watch app on the phone, if you go to music, is the "recent music" bullet on? If yes, then it downloads your songs automatically on your watch.

Why are you using Airplay? Do you not have the music loaded onto your watch?

I use Music directly from my watch. I tap the complication, I choose from "Listen Now", "Radio", "Library" or "Search". Yes, I do have an Apple Music subscription but before I did, I just loaded music from my library on to the watch.

My phone never enters into the equation.

I have been having this issue as well. Are you also seeing that when you pause your music, it switches back to the iphone? And if so, when you pause while still on the watchface, does the music icon at the top briefly show a purple question mark icon?

hockeybrian wrote:

I have reported it and as you see reports are starting to come in of others having similar/the same issue.

I don't see reports that are made to Apple. But, yes, I see one other person responding here. And 5 "me, too" clicks. Even if we assume ten times that number of people are experiencing this issue (which may well have multiple causes), that's an infinitesimally small percentage of users. Either not a bug or an amazingly rare one.

subnetmask wrote:

Something clearly isn't working as intended, unless you're saying Apple intentionally made what is reasonably a widely and frequently used app among the install base more difficult to use.

I'm saying that the problem the original poster described is not something everyone is having. I am not. And, it's not coming up a lot on these forums. And that makes it harder to troubleshoot as there is less data and it makes it far less likely that any updates Apple releases will have any effect.

Most people would just complain on social media and their local communities and Facebook and such. Apple doesn’t exactly make submitting feedback visible directly in iOS. ****, even I didn’t know how to do so until a kind fellow here shared a link.

On top of that, things like this is what we had betas for. If this occurred in the watchOS 10 betas, why was this not fixed?

Tjoeb123 wrote:

Most people would just complain on social media and their local communities and Facebook and such.

People complain here. A lot. Consider the current issue with the inability to use custom text tones that was introduced in iOS 17. It's everyone on these forums and there are many, many discussions in the wider internet.

On top of that, things like this is what we had betas for. If this occurred in the watchOS 10 betas, why was this not fixed?

Perhaps it didn't show up in the beta because it's not a watchOS bug? Or, because it's an extremely obscure one cause by an extremely unlikely combination of conditions that didn't arise for anyone who reported things.

Not everything that goes wrong is a bug. That doesn't mean it didn't go wrong. But, getting invested in the idea that it's a bug usually means people stop troubleshooting.

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.

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!

Thanks for this post. Since Apple watch 1, I've used this feature for working out. ie: I hate working out with my phone around me, so Apple Watch with downloaded music was the best!

In recent weeks, I couldn't figure out why this kept playing on my phone and not the usual through my watch and AirPods, and couldn't find in the settings where to tell the music to play from (watch or iphone)

This solution works and I'm now able to workout or run without having my phone present!!!

There was another update on Thursday for the iPhone. I figured out how to get to working again and after the update is was broken again. Got it fixed again but shouldn’t have to go through a bunch hoops to get it to work.