I got up at 3am to pre-order the Apple Watch and mine arrived on release day. My justification was simple — I have found the FitBit activity trackers to be useful but limited, and a more comprehensive device seemed like a great upgrade.
Unlike the many glowing reviews, I have found Apple’s much-hyped new gadget to be nothing but trouble. My litany of complaints is vast, so I will focus on a few major pain points that might dissuade others from purchasing this device until the next version is released.
Third-party app support
Third party app support is universally poor. I have not yet found a single third-party app that works well, they are all slow to load, quick to crash, and often fall out of sync with their phone apps. Apparently when the watch goes to sleep the watch app loses connection with the phone app, so things can’t just finish processing or loading in the background. You constantly have to stand there like a dope staring at your wrist waiting for something to happen.
Glances
The “glances” (cards) in the watch app for quick updates are also problematic for the same reason. Even Apple’s built-in glances, such as weather and stocks, do not update in the background, so I often find myself seeing yesterday’s weather or an out-of-date version of my todo list. Because I can’t trust the data to be accurate, I find myself not even bothering to use glances.
Watch faces
If you want a “digital” watch face with additional data (“complications”) rather than a pseudo-analog one, there is only one option. The level of customization is actually quite limited — you can’t put the time in the middle, for example, and while you can show your next calendar event or the phase of the moon, you can’t show your daily step count or any other third party app data. The calendar complication can only link out to Apple’s built in calendar app, the weather complication to Apple’s weather app, etc. There is no third-party integration possible, so if you like using Dark Skies to know when it is going to rain or Things for task management or basically any other of the thousands of third-party apps, there is no way to integrate them into your watch display.
Notifications
It is very difficult to tell the difference between a phone notification that is not actionable, a watch notification that can be tapped to get into an app, and the app displays themselves. The whole interface is confusing in that way — am I in a notification, an app, a glance? Will swiping work, or not? Tapping? It is complete inconsistent. And it is very easy to get lost or frustrated, tapping the screen repeatedly only to find nothing happening. Why tap repeatedly? Because sometimes in apps you need to tap multiple times to hit the tiny touch targets. And sometimes you hit the wrong one, end up somewhere else, and have no obvious way to get back.
General bugginess and unreliability
The built-in health tracking is extremely buggy. Sometimes it tells me it is “time to stand” while I am standing. Sometimes it tells me to stand when I’m in the car driving at 60 miles per hour. Sometimes it tells me I achieved a fitness goal while I’m in the middle of a run, knocking me out of my running app, which then crashes and will not reconnect with my phone, so I’m frantically navigating through the tiny app launcher while trying to keep up my pace. The scroll wheel (err, “digital crown”) gets mucked up and won’t turn until I run it under water. The maps app takes forever to update with my current location. Sometimes I get buzzes for notifications but then none display. Sometimes I send a text message reply and the whole watch freezes for 30 seconds. A couple times I’ve had to hold down both buttons to restart the watch because it got completely stuck.
If I’m going to wear a device on my wrist, I want it to integrate into my day. I want it to be effortless. I want it to show me the information I need when I need it. I don’t want to fiddle. I want the apps I already use to easily integrate and work well. I want to be able to hide the many apps that I don’t care about, making it easier to find the ones I do. I don’t want spurious notifications. I don’t want a watch that crashes.
The Apple Watch, in my experience, is a failure at its basic purpose. Even the buttons — there are two, one of which is dedicated to sending your friends drawings, which I will never do. There is no way to assign that button to something I might actually want to use, like a dedicated way to get to a single app, or back to the watch face.
Luckily, almost all of the problems I have run into are software related, so I can only hope that Apple will remedy them in software updates in the future. But will that be anytime soon? And will the updates work with this watch, or will I have to buy a newer model? In the case of the Apple Watch, it does not pay to be an early adopter.