Building an Apple Watch App For Track Workouts

The big limitation for using an AppleWatch for run workouts is that when your fingers are sweaty or if it's raining, having to touch the screen for start/stop/lap is a very unreliable experience. There needs to be a way to use the digital crown instead, but I assume that's a design restriction due to Apple guidelines...

Glad you are taking this on, something I considered doing myself before I got my Coros watch that I’m quite happy with now. Unfortunately for AW, touch is just not going to cut it as a usable interface, which I’m sure as a runner you know well. Spinning the crown is a step up, but the tactile feedback of pressing the crown is what a runner needs. Spinning is harder to do in winter with liner gloves on, especially if your running shirt doesn’t have a watch slit (with touch being completely unusable in that situation).

If you can capture the crown press with your own handler when your app is in the foreground and it’s possible to require, say, a double press of the crown to go back home and back to the default crown behavior, that would be ideal. Also, hopefully Apple gives the second button some higher relief as well for better tactile feedback in future versions.

Whadup pike

I actually don't mind the Apple Watch for easy, steady and progression runs and workouts on a measured track. Double tapping the screen works surprisingly well to lap using the stock workout app. I do find pressing the button and crown at the same time to pause a bit clunky though when running at pace, but I prefer to count my rest intervals as well as part of the workout so rarely pause.

What I would love is the option to pre-program workouts for road/time based workouts. I love building a workout such as 4x8 minutes on my Garmin (using the Garmin website and syncing the watch). I just follow along as it beeps to tell me when to stop/start. If my Apple Watch could do that, damn I would never wear the Garmin!

I've never used an Apple Watch and have no desire to get one so my thoughts might be off base, but here goes.

The touch screen of my old Timex has some severe limitations. It can be inadvertently set off if set too light just by brushing against your side or jacket. It is hard to activate with gloves or when cold or wet.

The workaround I developed was to set the tap sensitivity to hard and tap it with my fingernail. Instead of touch, I use a quick fingernail tap to start, stop, mark splits, etc. The fingernail tap works in wet, cold, and sweat. Even people with short fingernails can use the back of the fingernail. When wearing gloves, I use my knuckle.

Maybe something similar can be done with the Apple Watch.

S. Wozniak wrote:

The big limitation for using an AppleWatch for run workouts is that when your fingers are sweaty or if it's raining, having to touch the screen for start/stop/lap is a very unreliable experience. There needs to be a way to use the digital crown instead, but I assume that's a design restriction due to Apple guidelines...

This. The limitation is apple won't let you remodel the purpose of their buttons.

What a f'n waste to have to press 2 buttons to pause, and how the f knows how to lap.

If you could reprogram the buttons to be like a coros that would be amazing.

Apple is so blind on this.

You can easily build apps for garmin also… it is just that most people use the defaults because they are sufficient.

As already stated, the massive flaw with apple is the buttons. It is just not designed for serious running from a physical hardware interface perspective. The SO loves hers, but she never does workouts.

Check out crown run. Made by a guy I run with.

Fairly sure it uses the physical buttons.

Good news! My app update that allows the use of the crown to start, lap, stop, and reset the watch went live! Also these are all great ideas.

Can you develop with Flutter?

No I cannot. I really only have experience in iOS dev. I have thought about looking at it though. I did develop an Android app in Kotlin though not a very good one. (I do not believe Flutter is avalible for Apple Watch)

It's called ismoothrun. Sorry. Someone beat you to it.