WatchOS 10 makes playing music on watch so much more tedious

I (presumably like many others) have always used my watch to listen to music and track my runs.


WatchOS has progressively gotten worse in being easy and obvious to play music from the watch, if you try to start it while it is in range of your phone. It defaults to try and start music by controlling the phone. I got used to it but it was always annoying.


Now with WatchOS10 it makes it REALLY unintuitive and cumbersome.


Here are the steps I have to do to start my music. The music.app is a complication on my main watch face specifically so I can easily start music before a run. (This assumes that I am in range of my phone when I want to start the music which I always am at the beginning of my run and have played music on my phone since the last time I played it on my watch, which will always be the case)


  1. Hit music
  2. Hit the 3 little dots in the upper right
  3. Hit airplay
  4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the device list (of which I have many because this is showing every airplay destination my phone currently sees)
  5. Hit "Control other speakers & TVs"
  6. Hit Apple watch
  7. Hit play


That's really unintuitive and a crazy amount of steps and to do every time I want to go for a run.


Am I missing something?

They seemed to have completely overlooking people using their watch this way despite all the previous ads for working out/running while listening to music.


Posted on Sep 29, 2023 3:52 PM

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Posted on Dec 30, 2023 9:21 AM

Newsdude, on the watch, go to setting, general, handoff and turn « enable handoff «  off. It did it for me, but like you, I still have the problem with the app not remembering the last song played, and the shuffle option is real crap, I have 1200 songs on my Watch and sometimes the same song will play twice the same week

121 replies

Nov 17, 2023 3:21 AM in response to hockeybrian

I've just discovered this issue recently, thank you for posting the question.


I guess this is punishment for us bluetooth headphone users and Airpods don't have issues.

Nov 20, 2023 3:48 PM in response to hockeybrian

Thanks for the steps because I could not figure out how you were supposed to do it. I was resorting to turning wifi and bluetooth off in settings to get it to work. That's awful. I recently spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find the repeat button which is similarly buried and hard to find.


I guess apple watch users who exercise and listen to music from their watch is not a large use case?

Oct 9, 2023 6:50 AM in response to janfromherent

I had the same thought of using now playing since it has a screen to immediately select WHERE you want to play the music(phone or watch) and also discovered that most watch faces don't offer now playing as a complication because it is a "larger" complication and can only fit into certain slots. I've never understood this restriction and why they can't make Now playing a smaller complication.

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WatchOS 10 makes playing music on watch so much more tedious

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