My beef with watchOS 10

Ever since watchOS 3, Apple has provided us with a very useful and convenient feature: The ability to easily swipe left and right to change watch faces.

Not anymore.

With watchOS 10, that feature is long gone, and doesn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon. It was missing from the earliest of watchOS 10 betas, and I was thinking that it will eventually come back in a future update. I naively kept waiting and waiting, but it seems to be gone forever.

A key navigation technique that millions have been using for years on their watches, and not a single peep about it from the tech community. Heck, even regular people should be pissed.

WatchOS 10 officially has the slowest method available ever to change watch faces.

A barbaric touch and hold, followed by scrolling right or left in the edit screen. Even the original Apple Watch had a faster way to change watch faces with its Force Touch ability giving you almost instant access to the watch face edit screen.

If Apple had used the swipe right and left gestures for a different function, that would have been one thing, but they completely removed the gesture altogether. I find it hard to believe that the gesture was in some way not compatible with Apple’s new control interface.

Currently a swipe up from anywhere on the watch face takes you to your Smart Stack. Maybe there could be some software "collisions" in detecting a swipe up from a left or right swipe? If that were the case, the Smart Stack gesture should only work when swiping up from the bottom of the display and not anywhere on the display. With this setup, you could easily avoid issues with left and right swipes.

Quite frankly, I don’t think that it is a software issue, since there are hundreds of apps with much more complex touch controls and gestures.

Hopefully Apple will bring back this gesture once they realize how much people miss the ability to switch watch faces on a whim.