Watch Workout widget worse
December 24, 2025 at 10:50 AM by Dr. Drang
Greg Pierce, top turtle wrangler at Agile Tortoise, posted this to Mastodon last week:
Since updating to watchOS 26, about every third time I go to start a workout, I find later it didn’t start. The way the button animation swiping between workout types works creates an unnecessary delay activating the start button. Never had this problem before 26.
Is this just me?
No, Greg, it’s not just you.
The animation Greg’s talking about is the gradual appearance of the start button near the bottom of the screen when you get to the activity you want and stop swiping. I don’t think there’s a good way to record this, so you’ll have to imagine there’s a video here filling in between these two frames:
The start button appears after only a second—maybe less—but it seems like a long time because your finger is right there ready to tap it. Also, in previous versions there was no delay, so we’ve been trained to tap as soon as the desired activity appears.
Which brings me to my main gripe about the new Workout interface: that there’s a start button at all. It used to be that items in the scrolling list of activities were themselves the buttons to start a workout. We didn’t have to wait for the start button because there wasn’t one. And because the tap target was the entire item, it was bigger and easier to hit. Now you actually have to tap the little round button to start a workout.
Like Greg, I often find myself several minutes into a workout when my watch taps me to ask if I want to start recording the activity. For me, I think this happens more often because my finger missed the start button than because I tapped too soon, but the new UI has introduced both problems.
Winter has made this problem worse. My most common workout now is an outdoor walk—kayaking and biking are off the table—which means that I have to push my coat and shirt sleeves up my arm to reveal the watch, then reach over with my index finger to tap the button. I’m not saying this is the most difficult thing in the world, but it’s more difficult than it needs to be. And the proof is that it’s more difficult than it used to be.