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

I have both issues.

Optical HR tracking has its limits when in certain situations, as I've learned since getting my watch. Moreover, I'm not enough of an expert to know if bio-impedance is any better.

I'm most concerned about passive HR tracking dormancy. I do get HR readings that are inaccurate too, but they are infrequent don't represent the lion's share of my data.

That's right.  It ONLY seems to be updating the heart rate periodically, when not up and moving around for an extended period of time.  That's sort of the opposite of what you would want in a fitness tracker.  I don't really care to know that my heart rate is at 60 consistently while sitting down watching a movie. I want to know what it is when I'm up and moving about in order to help me accurately gauge my active calories. 

It records mine like clockwork every 10 minutes while I am sleeping which is good since I want to an accurate picture of my resting HR to gauge recovery from yesterday's training. Other than that, it is to the point now that I might get five or six other readings spread out throughout the day usually while I am very still.

Apple seems to have adopted the cheapo fitness tracker methodology of calorie counting, ask you how active you are, how much you weigh, your sex, and they use know norms to guesstimate calorie burn ... very, very sad for a device that starts at $349.

I'm having both issues, although the inaccurate readings seems to not be as bad as they were a couple of days ago. It's definitely sporadic when I'm not using the exercise app. I mentioned in an earlier post that I've jumped from 212 (impossible) to 36 (also impossible) with minutes of each other when I've been totally at rest.

I certainly hope they get a new release out soon.

I agree. If I had to do it all over again, I would save my money and buy a Fitbit.  My recommendation for anyone thinking about getting an Apple Watch as a fitness tracker is to wait until version 3 in a couple of years. Hopefully by then Apple will have this watch thing figured out.

You do have it to do over again.  You can call Apple, complain and get a refund.   I did today and I received it the day it came out.  Buying an HR fitness tracker that no longer tracks heart rate is like buying a watch where the time-telling functionality has been removed to save battery life.

Add my name to the list also for the watch now taking sporadic HR readings. It's beyond frustrating. The watch used to attempt to take my HR every ten minutes prior to the watch OS update. Now it sometimes goes 2-3 hours without attempting to take a reading. It makes the activity rings completely inaccurate. So many times I've been active(not exercising) and the watch misses my HR which basically misses how active I am and not crediting me for being active. Hope Apple fixes this ASAP.

I contacted apple support and first they had me do an unpair and setup from restore and that did not work.  So then they talked me into trying a setup as new and not install the apps (actually I chose not to install them figured if I was losing everything might as well start completely fresh).  I waited 30 mins and had 3 ten min heart rate checks.  I am now trying installing my apps, music, photos, apple pay, and setting it all up like I like it and will get back to you if it still working or not for me.  Maybe worth a try I know others have said they have tried this and didn't work for them.  Maybe I did things a little different by selecting not to install apps and to install them later but maybe worth a try for others to see if it works for them.

To my surprise I've just discovered that while sleeping my AW (updated to 1.0.1 a week ago and experimenting the infamous heart rate bug) works exactly as before, logging an HR reading exactly every 10 minutes for a whole night and reverting to the buggy behaviour once I wake up.

Maybe it's just that I was not moving... but I spend hours almost not moving at my notebook the whole day and I get an HR reading every 2-3 hours so I suspect it's something else.

It is not possible that the current behaviour is by design, it wouldn't make any sense to get HR only when the watch is not moving.

And if it just skips bad readings this would mean that the sensor has a really poor performance, I hope this is not the case.

A third possibility is that is just a sw bug, for example if the watch is busy processing data from accelerometer it can't detect HR correctly.

HR issues cause even more trouble during workouts. Today during a tennis workout I got minutes of no HR data at all. And for many minutes I got bad (low) readings which were not possible during this kind of activity. The whole workout session was counted for half the calories it used to be counted a week ago (with 1.0).

I have now tried every possible solution to rectify the inaccuracies and infrequency but am at a loss. Here is the sum of my readings today while at the office with no exercise and if anyone tries to suggest that this is by design, I would say they are wholly misinformed.

It is very disappointing as I received my watch on the day of the update so have essentially had a faulty product since receipt. All we can seemly do is sit, wait until they scramble to fix the issue and accept that one of its main functions is down until they do. I have no doubt that they will in time but it is infuriating nonetheless.

Shouldnt be this way and certainly not for this long. Perhaps I expect too much?

I don't think you're expecting too much at all. I would've hoped testing the 1.0.1 update before releasing it would've revealed this obvious break in the HR sensor.

I've had mine since April 24 and up until the 1.0.1 update I was wondering when the first batch of significant V1 bugs would rear their ugly heads because sailing was, by and large, mostly smooth, not 100% perfect yet nothing like this HR problem. I'm as annoyed and disappointed as you are, but it has helped me a little bit to frame this as an expected disappointment all early adopters face in the beginning. And, we are all correct to hold Apple to a much, much higher standard. My guess is they are probably cracking all kinds of whips to fix this asap (read: before WWDC). I don't believe this is an expected behavior of the HR sensor at all.

very disappointed with apple ive spent 600 on this watch and apple won't even acknowledge this heart rate issue let alone send us a fix for it. And now they have publicly acknowledged the iMessage issue which is minor, what about this issue apple? At least tell us you have done wrong and are fixing it!!!

This couldn't be worse. The main reason many of us bought this watch was for its fitness feature &  now is useless. Apple you need to hurry up and fix this. The watch is useless to many of your customers. I've owned almost every fitness band made and couldn't be unhappier with this watch update.

If you haven't already, please post feedback to Apple here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/watch.html

Also, wouldn't hurt to call Support and/or Apple Care to report the issue.

Adding my feedback that with version 1.0.1 I also see large gaps in time with no readings.  Sometimes I get 10 minute updates, sometimes it's an hour or more.  During a workout it so far seems fine.  I do not see any readings that seem abnormal, so my only issue is the lack of regular updates.

I submitted my feedback ;-)