The Apple Watch Ultra 2 during the first day of in-store sales at Apple's Fifth Avenue store in New York, US, on Sept 20, 2024. — Bloomberg
As a general rule, designing software is a delicate balance. You want to introduce new features that will delight your customers without disrupting the way they already use their devices.
If you do introduce a feature or a change to an interface that requires your users to adapt, it better be worth it. Otherwise, you're just going to make people mad – no matter how hard you try to delight them.
As an example, I would point to watchOS 11, which Apple rolled out last week. Overall, watchOS 11 is a perfectly fine update. If you're using a Series 9 or 10, or an Apple Watch Ultra 2, you gain Sleep Apnea detection. There's also a new Vitals app, as well as a few new watch faces. There is, however, one glaring problem.
This year, Apple changed the default behaviour for Live Activities. Now, they automatically launch when you start playing music or a podcast, for example. Honestly, it's one of my least favourite feature changes Apple has made in a long time.
In case you've forgotten, Live Activities are a persistent form of notification that allows real-time updates on your devices. So, if you ordered food from Uber Eats, a Live Activity will appear on your iPhone Home Screen to show you the status of your delivery. Or, if you're traveling, an app like Flighty can show you the current status of your flight.
On the watch, Live Activities is found in a tray called the Smart Stack that you can access by swiping up on the screen. It's also where widgets reside on the watch. According to Apple, in the new release "The Smart Stack becomes even more intelligent, providing quick access to the right information, right when you need it with suggested widgets, interactive widgets, and Live Activities."
The thing is, Apple might think it's making it “more intelligent”, but it's really just annoying. To be fair, it's a nice interface, and I'm happy Smart Stack and widgets and live activities all exist, but none of it is something I want to look at.
It's certainly not something that should automatically take over my screen. I'd much rather see the watch face I've chosen – with its carefully curated selection of notifications – even if I just started listening to a podcast.
To be clear, I don't have anything against Live Activities. It's just that I don't really ever use them on my watch. I definitely don't want them to automatically turn on just because I launched a podcast. There's a reason I use the Modular Ultra watch face. It has all of the information I want to see at a glance.
I suspect Apple made Live Activities launch automatically because most people never use them. It's a way of surfacing a feature a lot of people probably didn't even know existed. The thing is, it's OK if people didn't know they existed. The solution isn't to force a feature on everyone, whether they want it or not.
I found it so annoying that Apple made Live Activities launch by default that at first I thought it must be a bug. It made me regret updating my Apple Watch Ultra 2.
While I still think it's a terrible user interface, thankfully, you can turn the feature off. On your Apple Watch, open the Settings app, and select Smart Stack > Live Activities and toggle "Auto-Launch Live Activities" off. You can also turn Live Activities off altogether, though I think they are fine – as long as they don't take over your watch.
There's actually a really important lesson here, which is that you should almost never turn on a disruptive feature by default just because you think it's a great feature that everyone should know about.
If you do, you're pretty much telling the customer that you think your opinion of how they should use their device is more important than their own. That's one thing no company should ever do. – Inc./Tribune News Service
