Ben Daubney

Two months with an Apple Watch

I've previously discussed my long-time love affair with wearable devices, concluding that although the devices themselves are often good the software usually leaves much to be desired. Poorly updated apps, incomplete syncing, and fitness metrics that don't encourage in a meaningful way are the big criticisms of the three or four devices I've used over the past few years.

I concluded that article by noting that I intended to try an Apple Watch. Apple's reputation for a polished user experience coupled with well considered design philosophy should mean an end or, at least, a significant reduction of those annoying little issues that are common amongst other devices.

Does that expectation meet reality? Yes... and no. It does some things really well but others are, to be frank, pretty terrible.

Getting started

Let's take some things as rote: being an Apple product, the support is great, the workmanship on the device is second-to-none, and setup is little more than a case of putting in a password. It's comfortable to wear and it gets all my default settings straight away, so aside from needing a battery charge upon purchase it's pretty much ready to use right out of the box.

Battery life

Incidentally, the battery hasn't been a problem for me at all. Apple's press material suggests that the battery should 'last all day' - in everyday use that's often been an understatement. It's not unusual to end the day with half or more of the battery's power still available; it's incredibly rare that the 'low battery' warning pops up and asks to engage a low power consumption mode to extend the watch life a little further.

I have seen that prompt once; it popped up at around 5pm on a seemingly average day. A little bit of exploring suggested that a crashed third-party app was constantly making the watch operate - but more on that later.

The bottom line is that if you take your watch off overnight, taking this opportunity to charge the device should mean that you never have to worry about battery life at all.

Native apps

Something else to not worry about is the quality of the built-in apps. Everything the watch comes preloaded with is thoughtfully designed, works really well, and doesn't have an ounce of waste.

The text message app is a great example: on loading, there's a list of people who have texted you since the watch was activated and against each is the first twenty characters of their last text and the time or date it was received. Tap one of those entries, and the conversation opens at the last text. If you need to reply, winding the crown upwards reveals a 'reply' button with a very clever context aware list of short possible responses. If you receive a message asking if you'd like either Italian or Chinese for dinner tonight, the top two possible responses are 'Italian' and 'Chinese'. Need to reply with a little more detail? A microphone button enables dictation via Siri which, nowadays, works perfectly 99% of the time. There's the option to reply with emoticons too, and naturally the list that's presented shows your most-used emoticons at the top - not just the most used on your watch, but most used across all of your devices.

It's an absolute delight, and it works so deceptively simply. There's a lot of thought that's gone into such a mundane application, and that's typical right across every single app. Everything that's on the device has been done before - email, text messaging, stopwatch, stock ticker and so on - but it's so refined, so clever. 

The apps that break new ground are equally as polished.

Apple Pay in particular has been flawless - the interface within the Wallet app displays just the right amount of information at any one time, and the doubletap of the power button at any point to display your cards is very elegant. Paying for coffees and groceries with the watch is almost frictionless, certainly simpler than digging out a wallet or phone, waiting to enter a PIN, and so forth. Once stores roll out contactless payments more widely, it would certainly be my preferred payment method in any situation, but for now remains a fun curiosity amongst the few places where I can make small value purchases.

Non-native apps

It's often where the user experience moves beyond Apple's reach that the watch suffers. How shops manage contactless payments is a small issue; how developers have created apps is quite another.

Almost without exception, the apps available right now are not worth looking at. 

All of the big hitters - Twitter, Facebook, eBay and so forth - have watch apps. All of them are all but useless. Why would I want to see a beautifully shot and edited picture on my tiny watch screen? Why would I want to scroll through a list of tweets there? Why would I want to bid on a screen where I can't see details like postage costs and shipping details? 

There are a few apps that make sense on the wrist. Strava, the cycling and running ecosystem, has a great app that is just a start session/stop session button. IFTTT have a great app that, again, is just a button allowing the app to do other things using IoT devices. 'Press a button to do something elsewhere' apps aside, the better apps duplicate things that the watch already does natively, such as the excellent Dark Sky weather app. Though Dark Sky is better than the standard weather app for me, it's not doing anything really new or revolutionary. 

It's a far cry from the variety of apps available for the iPad, the iPhone, or even for the Mac. Developers in the main haven't grasped the point of the Apple Watch yet and are duplicating their iPhone-based counterparts really poorly. 

Things don't always work

Even if they were excellent, Apple Watch does not handle third party apps well at all. They are slow to load - often, the screen turn off before the app has loaded! - they crash, they hang... frankly, it's poor. The experience of the total battery drain one day seemingly caused by a crashed or hanging app and having no way to know that the app had crashed until the battery was almost dead is pretty typical of the user experience here. There's no way to see if an app is behaving properly, no way to force close it if it's misbehaving, no way to make them behave. 

And, bloody hell, if there's one big problem with the watch right now, it's that all that background stuff - opening, closing, sharing of information between apps, loading - is terrible. It's not that third party developers have released poorly written apps; at a core, fundamental level, bits of functionality on the watch work temporarily if at all:

And text messages. Text messages are an absolute pain. What should happen is that when a message is received, it appears on my watch first, then on my phone/iPad/computer if I haven't looked at the watch. That happens sometimes, but it's more common that the message will appear all at once or, even more frequently, the message won't come through to my watch at all. If I look at a text message chain on my phone it shows a complete record of that conversation. On my watch, it shows spits and spats of the conversation where it's decided to work at any given moment. 

That is very poor. HandOff, Apple's syncing service that enables a user to see all of their data and apps and messages and documents on any device at any moment, has been spotty in the past, but it's always retroactively caught up with itself (a missed message in a text chain will appear after an hour, for example). Here, it's not working right at all. 

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

In finding a solution to these problems, the common advice is to wipe the watch and start again, a process that takes 10-15 minutes each time. 

I've done this multiple times. Whenever I do, I have to add my credit and debit cards to the Wallet app, but otherwise it's pretty simple and all but automatic. 

But every time I do, a new problem appears. An app suddenly won't install, or my location-based services stop working. Usually it calms down after a few hours, but there will always be something not quite working, more often than not the HandOff functionality. As I write this, the readout of the weather on the watch face tells me it's raining but, looking at the same app on my iPhone, it (correctly) says that there's no more rain today. Last week, trying to get to the readout of how many minutes of exercise I'd had that day caused the Activity app to crash; although this resolved itself the next day, it was an irritation for the day. If I receive a text message that (gasp!) actually appears on my watch and not my phone, it'll display that message along with the first message I'd received from that person on the watch too.

It's... not right, and far from the Apple ideal of 'it just works'.

Keep or return?

There's a generous two no quibble returns policy on the watch. Towards the end of my first fortnight, I considered whether or not it was worth the money, particularly given the ropey performance of the built-in functionality. It is, after all, a lot of money and if it doesn't work (not just doesn't work well but key functionality doesn't work) then it's pretty much a given that it should be returned. 

But I was really torn. It wasn't a simple decision. The flaws are frustrating no doubt, but it's a fully working computer with connectivity to the internet on something that's about the size of a postage stamp. It blows my mind that there's a screen, a battery, a computer, and all sorts of bits and pieces to support them in something that's less than half the size of a bourbon biscuit. 

But it still doesn't work properly, so novelty aside it should go back.

Then again, the watch face is set up to show me everything I possibly need at a glance - not just the time and date, but my next appointments, my daily fitness, my next appointment... And all of those things work very reliably indeed. But again, that could just be duplicating notifications from my phone's locked screen - glancing at that rather than at my wrist could save me three hundred quid or more. 

The Apple Pay feature is lovely, but in any situation where it could be used I've inevitably got my other hand ready to pull out my wallet in apprehension that there's no contactless payment available at the till or I'm spending more than £20. It's a gimmick and one that I can entirely live without.

Despite all these considerations, I still own the watch. Though I love the design itself, there's really one thing that convinced me that it is a worthwhile investment.

Fitness tracking

As a long-time user of wearable devices, I know how rewarding and frustrating it can be having something that constantly tracks some fitness metrics. It's great when you're hitting some kind of goals and ultimately depressing when you're not. All of my previous devices duly calculated my number of steps with some broad degree of accuracy and diligently reported that number back to me every day. I'd look at that number, shrug that I hadn't met the 10k target, and move on. 

Measurement, I realise, is not enough. A good wearable should motivate you to hit and even exceed a fitness goal. Moving an arbitrary number of steps every day helped burn calories, I was sure, but it didn't feel like a loss when I didn't meet that arbitrary goal. It didn't feel personal to me, feeling as seemingly random pseudoscience like needing to drink a certain number of glasses of water every day. 

Since wearing my Apple Watch, that has totally changed.

The watch does measure the number of steps you take, but that's not a prime metric of your daily fitness. Instead, it presents your day by measuring three other things:

These three things are shown as three concentric rings of different colours and can, if desired, be shown on most of the built-in watch faces. A quick glance at any time can therefore show you how 'well' you're doing throughout the day.

This approach is so clever and well thought out. The goals are achievable but require effort, making them seem reasonable and appropriate. It feels bad not to hit those goals. And the watch prompts you throughout the day, nudging you ten minutes before the end of a lazy hour to get up and move around, rewarding you with a happy 'you did it!' prompt if you do then take some action. The completion of a goal each day is celebrated the moment the milestone has passed with a happy little chirp and/or a tap on the wrist with a note telling you how you've done. And presenting the goals as concentric circles almost begs you into wanting to close the loop when you're close to reaching a daily goal.

This, really, is where the Apple Watch shines for me. I find myself wanting to hit my three goals every day and will often go out for a late evening walk just to beat that activity goal. I'm walking more at lunchtimes and weekends, and even though I've no real goal to improve my fitness or weight I've definitely felt my waistline reducing and my desire to more increasing.

Indeed, all the wearables I've used over the past year or so feed into a standard Health app on my phone showing me the number of steps and (roughly) calories I've burnt, and since using the watch those numbers have steadily increased. Right now my average step count is around 9,500 steps per day; on my Withings Activité Pop or Jawbone Up, it'd be extremely rare for me to hit the 8k goal I ended up setting myself. Without wanting to be 'healthier', the Apple Watch has made me undoubtedly more active. 

Comparing the watch to other wearables shows just how lacklustre other efforts are. I lamented how poor the awards system is on the Withings ecosystem because they only really praised the user when they met a lifetime step goal; on the Apple Watch I'm awarded medals on a frequent basis based on my goals and it actually feels good to get them! As of this moment, I've hit my move goal for 65 days in a row and, as a result, I'm getting a medal every day that celebrates that I'm on my longest move streak. I want to see that medal every day - my laziness might cause me to not see that medal for two months or more and I don't want that to happen.

This is the best example of gamification I've ever experienced. It's so subtle and designed to get the user to do just a bit more than they might otherwise do. It's achievable, it's satisfying, and it works so well. I cannot praise it enough.

The future

Fitness tracking won't be for everyone, though. Apple knows this, which is why the watch is (meant to) do so much more than that. I'd imagine that many who might buy the watch would be terribly put out by the problems I've experienced and would dismiss it as undercooked, whereas I'm happy to put up with the issues because fitness tracking has become important to me.

It's worth remembering that this is a first generation product and some problems are to be expected. The first iPhone had a very slow data connection and no app store; the first iPad had no camera. But those devices seemed to do what they advertised, whereas here the problems prevent the product working as it should. All of the problems I've encountered are problems with the software so I suspect that most of the issues will be resolved over time, but there's no guarantee of that. The watch already has an awful lot of computing power in such a small space, and it may be that many of these issues are symptomatic of asking too much of a small device. 

The problems do break the magic that Apple products often tend to have, and it's really frustrating as a result. This doesn't feel like a totally refined and polished product as yet, though one can imagine that by the second or third iteration it'll be much better.

The future's genuinely rosy for the watch. It's already a pretty amazing device, and once it has a little more sheen to overcome some annoyances, it'll be truly fantastic.

But it's not just the Apple Watch that stands to improve in the future. Yes, the device is well designed and works really well, but undoubtedly the best feature - the fitness tracking - has come from Apple examining what motivates people, what sort of presentation would work, how to keep people engaged, and so forth. Anyone could have done that and implemented them into their wearable device's apps; there'll be an inevitable copying of the better features by some of Apple's competitors over the next year or two. That's not a bad thing - as many technology companies start competing in this space, all will improve over time. It's nice that my Apple Watch sort-of- kind-of works right now at a £300 price tag; it'll be brilliant in five years' time when any old manufacturer can produce one that works perfectly for £100 or so.

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