Solution to Apple Watch music App instability post 26.1 upgrade

Music App on Apple watch unstable post 26.1 (Solution): I've seen a lot of complaints about stability of the music app on the Apple Watch after the 26.1 update. Thought I would share in case others are experiencing same issue.

Symptoms: After upgrading to WatchOS 26.1 using the music app on the watch was not possible with music downloaded to the watch. Music would not advance from one song to the next, it would just stop. Installing WatchOS26.2 did NOT fix it and may have made it worse. Once I went to 26.2 I could not get through a single song before the music app crashed. Using the On-watch controls to pause, advance track, go back one track, play would work a few times but then would become unresponsive and the music app would crash.

What DID NOT fix it:

1) Reboots

2) unpair and re-pair as new watch

3) changing various Auto Launch and hand-off settings

4) installing the update to 26.2

What DID work: Getting to my music and starting playback of playlists differently. I had always played downloaded music by first going to the top menu on the watch (SE) where the options are Home, Radio and Library. I would choose Library > Downloaded > Playlists and navigate to the playlist I wanted. I would start the playlist or shuffle it, and the watch would remember playlist location after I stopped it and came back to the watch days later. When I tried this method post 26.1 and even 26.2 the music app was useless.

However, if instead at the Library menu option I chose Playlists directly instead of Downloaded > playslists and navigated to the playlist that way, the music app would behave as expected. No crashes, advance, pause, play etc... all work repeatedly. Music will play for hours with no problem advancing and the position in the playlist is remembered.

No idea why one method of getting to the playlist produces and unusable experience and the other method works as expected. Hopefully this will help someone else who is frustrated with their watch and about to throw it away continue to use it. Maybe this will be useful to someone on the development team at Apple and give them a clue what is going on and they can address it in the next version.

The feature report for 26.2 says that it solves the "won't advance to the next song" bug. It did not do that for me, but a different method of playing the same playlist did solve the problem.