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After the Apple Watch 1.0.1 Update, Heart Rate stopped working...

After I updated my Watch to 1.0.1, the heart rate monitor no longer monitors my heart rate in the background. It only monitors my heart rate when I ask it to take a reading.


This is really, really annoying. Has anyone else experienced this? It was working perfectly before the update.

Apple Watch, Watch OS 1.0.1

Posted on May 20, 2015 8:18 AM

Reply
343 replies

May 30, 2015 9:07 AM in response to bobv190

This is infuriating. So the functionality is now best to monitor someone who is in a coma and just doesn't move. Again, I don't care that my heart rate is great when I'm sitting around not doing anything. It's when I'm up and moving around that matters to me. I understand that I can turn on one of the exercise functions to get more frequent measurements, but that is annoying and unnecessary. That in itself would be a battery drain. For instance, if I'm out on the town for an evening, I'm going to be more active and it would make sense to take hr measurements every 10 minutes instead of multiple times a minute. That slight altering of the support document is insulting to early adopters and misleading from the entire marketing campaign that sold us on the watch. I'm pretty sure one of the videos I watched from the press conference or the watch app also mentioned taking the measurements every 10 minutes.


I have no problems being an early adopter and dealing with bugs, but slight-of-hand "here's a core feature… now it's gone, but that's how it's supposed to function" is not ok.

May 30, 2015 9:46 AM in response to Mamoru16

So yeah, during my 90 minutes of tennis today I watched it very closely, even when the exercise app is on, if the watch gets too busy the heart sensor stops functioning properly. It's as if too many things are in the watch queue, and it gets pushed to the back of the line until the watch is done. The heart rate monitor is has been prioritized to the lowest priority setting (probably in the kernel or task scheduler) Every time it stopped, I'd stop playing tennis until it caught up, and it would be fine until it got too busy again, then it would completely stop working until I stopped again.


This is completely unacceptable for a fitness device. If it is going to be billed as a fitness device, it must be fitness first, and all other functions second.

May 30, 2015 10:20 AM in response to Mamoru16

I agree. Apple needs to address this directly, instead of via (not so) clandestine overnight editing at the end of a week. I expect more out of Apple.

What's starting to settle in with me is that the AW still has promise as a wrist-worn computer, but is a half-baked, not ready for primetime fitness tracker.

I don't know what I'm going to do now that this news has broken. The idea of having $500 back in my pocket is tempting. Never thought I'd seriously consider returning an Apple product. I'm torn, like others, because I love the computer functionality yet the fitness stuff hasn't lived up to expectations, even reasonable expectations that factored in early adopter bugs/growing pains.

I'm sending the 9-to-5 Mac story to blogs.


Mamoru16 wrote:


This is infuriating. So the functionality is now best to monitor someone who is in a coma and just doesn't move. Again, I don't care that my heart rate is great when I'm sitting around not doing anything. It's when I'm up and moving around that matters to me. I understand that I can turn on one of the exercise functions to get more frequent measurements, but that is annoying and unnecessary. That in itself would be a battery drain. For instance, if I'm out on the town for an evening, I'm going to be more active and it would make sense to take hr measurements every 10 minutes instead of multiple times a minute. That slight altering of the support document is insulting to early adopters and misleading from the entire marketing campaign that sold us on the watch. I'm pretty sure one of the videos I watched from the press conference or the watch app also mentioned taking the measurements every 10 minutes.


I have no problems being an early adopter and dealing with bugs, but slight-of-hand "here's a core feature… now it's gone, but that's how it's supposed to function" is not ok.

May 30, 2015 11:03 AM in response to Mamoru16

This is definitely annoying. But I totally understand, we're early adopters. I just don't understand how the watch literally was fine as a fitness tracker before the update. I remember this because I made it a point to do different physical activities with it. It's mainly why I bought the watch. From weight lifting, to cycling, to even jumping jacks. On top of that, the battery life was still totally acceptable. One day I did two workout activities in one day and I still had approx. 13% charge by 11pm. It all seemed to work correctly. There were definitely bugs with some other apps, but as an early adopter, fine, it comes with the territory. I figure Apple will just fix with updates. But this thing where they're trying to cover up the MAIN feature of the watch after the update? It doesn't even make sense. They just need to fix this ASAP and I'll be a happy camper.

May 30, 2015 11:36 AM in response to pagemakers4

I think this is bizarre. I wonder if Tim Cook is talking to the Engineering team and asking "well, how was it suppose to work"? That's seems unlikely to me. These kinds of new products at Apple have generally been pretty tightly designed and launched. For there to be confusion at this point about the "fitness" capability of the Watch seems improbable. Something's not working as intended and the fix may be beyond software. Why else would they go so far as to change the marketing languange in the light of night? The idea that the original marketing language was incorrect as published is nonsense. Apple is SO careful about what it says publicly. The original words were well chosen. Now they've devisively restated things after the launch. It's abnormal. Plain and simple.

May 30, 2015 11:52 AM in response to Jcannonb

Maybe Apple didn't think that we would notice or miss this fiction. It was working before the update so it's not like it didn't work. Funny thing is why didn't they tell apple support team bc I have been on the phone with them several times and now they have me all the way up to my own personal support guy calling me be taking care of me. Guess we will see what happens now that they have seen what ppl really wanted instead of maybe a few battery % saved.

After the Apple Watch 1.0.1 Update, Heart Rate stopped working...

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