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hockeybrian Author

Level 1

60 points

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)

Hit music
Hit the 3 little dots in the upper right
Hit airplay
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)
Hit "Control other speakers & TVs"
Hit Apple watch
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

Top-ranking reply

newsdude

Level 1

58 points

Posted on Oct 12, 2023 3:03 PM

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.

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WatchOS 10 makes playing music on watch so much more tedious

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