a UX parable
the apple watch has four features.
- your watch patches itself in the middle of the night after an idle period, so it’s pretty sure you’re not using it (this is good.)
- if you have an iPhone with alarms set on it, the alarms only go off on your phone if the phone can’t contact your watch, and otherwise go off on your watch, which alarms quietly by tapping your wrist. (this is good like 98% of the time.) there’s no watchdog timer or fallback on this, it just assumes your watch has it from there. (this is wildly shortsighted and I imagine there’s some technical concern responsible.)
- if an alarm would be going off on your watch but the alarm app isn’t foregrounded, it doesn’t play any of the associated alerts, either intentionally because it can’t tell you what those alerts are associated with or accidentally because of some internal detail of the watch’s task switching framework. (this is understandable, if sometimes tragic.)
- when any apple product applies an update, it goes back to the initial out of box experience screen to tell you that it patched itself. this OOBE screen seems to not obey all of the standard rules of notifications and task switching because it only appears once and it could contain important information, so it requires human interaction to dismiss (this is… well, let’s leave it at noble. it’s certainly the least useful of these four features.)
so this morning I woke up with no alarm and saw the following sequence of screens on my watch:
- hello (from that mac demo in 1983. apple is in love with its corporate mythology and every time its products fuck up this wink and nod gets a little more irritating.)
- Welcome to watchOS 26.
- it’s 8:47! time for your 7:30 wake up alarm. taptaptaptaptap