I am seriously at the end of the line with the Apple Watch. I just received my 3rd watch, this time upgrading to the ultra, and while I love the size and look and all that, I have a massive issue with this product.
I can’t even get 15 seconds into a workout without the watch pausing the work out. I do have some tattoos but my previous apple watches worked much better than the Ultra iteration. I don’t understand why apple doesn’t just put out an update that tells the watch, hey don’t fucking pause constantly during work outs.
It’s such bs because if I start a run and don’t initiate the workout on my watch, it will prompt me at the end of my run to record the workout, and all the data is recorded perfectly. But if I try to start the run on my watch at the beginning, every 10 seconds it pauses.
Seems like an easy fix to me, just eliminate feature that pauses workouts constantly, there is literally no use for auto pausing a workout, if we want to pause I will look down and press pause.
Boggles my mind they haven’t fixed this yet. I’ve seen some threads on reddit about this but I am curious to know how many others are affected by this issue?
Almost everyone with tattoos has experienced this issue, probably you have already seen the hundreds of posts about it for the past 7 years, but the severity of the problem with wrist detection varies based on the darkness, technique, age, etc. of the tattoo. If your previous watches cooperated better, then it’s probably because the sensors on the back of the Ultra are situated a bit differently, (same circular layout, but not the same) so now the sensors are being blocked more by the pattern on your wrist. Also, the Ultra is heavier than previous models, so based on how you hold your hand during the workout, if the band is not tight enough, the watch body may slightly shift away from your skin instead of laying flat, making things worse. In any case, the optical sensors on the Ultra in this regard were not made better or worse for tattoo users. Auto-pausing the workout is not what happens to you, that’s a separate feature you can disable in settings under workout. Your workout tracking fails because wrist detection fails.
Try wearing different bands, try wearing your watch further up or down your wrist or switch hands if that’s possible for you.
I appreciate the thought out response but I don’t know why they can’t just program it not to pause. I already went through and adjusted the settings.
It doesn’t make sense to me that the workout just pauses after 10 seconds when I start it, but if I go on a 30 minute walk eventually it will prompt me asking if I’m on a walk and want to record it. When I press yes, it has all 30 minutes and then the watch just pauses 10 seconds after I accept.
If tattoos are the issue how did it record the previous 30 minutes? I’m convinced Apple could patch.
It pauses because the watch starts recording heart rate almost constantly while you are in a workout, while it takes reading once every 4-5 minutes most of the time normally. It doesn’t use heart rate as a clue that you may have started a workout - it uses arm motion, and (probably) checks location services to see if you are moving in a way that suggests that you may be walking. But once you start the workout and it tries to read heart rate constantly and it thinks that you don’t have a heart rate, it pauses (probably assuming that you maybe you took the watch off of your wrist after forgetting to pause or end the workout.)
That’s just the way it works. I know you think it should work otherwise… but it doesn’t. Apple isn’t likely to change it unless enough people suggest the change, so use the Feedback form to make a suggestion.
Have you tried using the watch on your other wrist?
It’s more like a physics problem than a software problem. Imagine if Apple decreses the sensitivity on wrist detection to make the Apple watch experience better for tattoed users, so they decide to ignore some instances when the light emitted by the sensors can’t provide enough feedback because they are absorbed by the dark spots. That would overall make the safety features of the watch worse, for example in theory someone could just snatch the watch off you on the street, then fasten it on their own wrist and carry on with it, using ApplePay and such… so overall it’s a difficult problem to handle, it’s no wonder Apple still could not address it after releasing 9 generations of watches. It’s not because they are lazy to release a simple software patch. You can influence them to maybe shift priorities and work on this issue more by submitting your feedback, that’s about all you can do right now unless you are willing to remove or lighten the tattoo.
All they have to do is just let it go and not pause and all would be solved