5 ms·

My Pixel Watch sucks and it's not because the screen isn't big or bright enough. The implementation of notifications is awful. It's actually faster and easier i

My Pixel Watch sucks and it's not because the screen isn't big or bright enough. The implementation of notifications is awful. It's actually faster and easier in many cases to whip out my phone to see a notification than to see it on the watch. Why? Because notifications are not shown by default. The watch vibrates but nothing is there on the screen but the watch face. To trigger a notification to actually show, you need to rotate your wrist down (if it is up) and then up again (impossible if you are carrying something). Then you have to wait for it to recognize the gesture. Then you have to wait for a fade animation to an intermediate screen that shows half of the information about the notification. Then you have to wait for a fade animation to the final screen that actually shows the notification text. And if you lower your wrist at all during or after this process, the notification disappears instantly and won't come back without the use of both hands to activate the touchscreen or crown. And in many cases the information shown is useless, like "so-and-so sent a picture." Show me the goddamn picture then! It boggles the mind that anyone could think this is a good experience to ship at all, let alone for three generations! Especially when Pebble had it right 10 years ago. You show the notification on the screen first, then you vibrate the watch, then you leave the notification there for at least 30 seconds so it can be read. You show the whole notification at once (as much as possible on the small screen, of course), and you also show a small clock at the top so you can still see the time while the notification is shown. How hard is that? Of course this isn't the only way the Pixel Watch software sucks. The whole UX is pretty terrible, like they had some ideas and went straight to final implementation, never bothering to iterate based on user feedback. Low information density, low customizability, feature-poor, unresponsive interactions, blocking animations. It's everything bad about modern UI in a tiny frustrating package. I don't know what is wrong with all the tech reviewers that fail to call Google out on this stuff. Maybe it's better than Samsung or whatever but that doesn't make it good. At least the hardware is nice. Though, like all smartwatches except the Pebble Time Round, far too thick.

dotnet00 2y ago
Yeah this is very annoying about notifications on my Samsung watch too, probably an android watch issue in general. For me, watch notifications have become just a way to know about particularly important things like email or certain chats. Often my watch will vibrate and I'll just switch to the tab with my mail in it without bothering to wait for the watch. It's crazy how they can't manage to make these work faster. There's more than enough processing power in there, but the software is just so bloated.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mattnewton 2y ago
When I worked at Google I got re-orged into the same division as pixel / android. My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone for personal use, and I am pretty sure I saw an Apple Watch on my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple- I remember several internal sites would ask you to file a radar (bug report) on why you switched to chrome from safari if you opened them in chrome. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices after 5pm. There is a lot of incredible talent in that team but I think Google needs a minor culture shift to compete with Apple here.
- tomComb 2y ago
  Interacting with Googler's in the past I noticed the same thing but took it a different way. Clearly there was no pressure to use the Google product so they used a wide diversity of devices and services, and I saw this as a healthy thing.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I think that for the rank and file, not needing to use the device is fine. But if you are a manager/product owner/etc (especially over teams in charge of said devices) then YOU specifically should have to use google devices like 24/7 as part of your job. I think it's unhealthy for those in charge not to use the products they sell, especially when talking about consumer goods.
    - summerlight 2y ago
      I think those directors, VPs and PMs should be mandated to use their own products. Okay to keep iPhone, but use Android as well, at least for their corp works. The product quality of Workspace and Chrome is debatable but it's not even remotely comparable to those niche market products because everyone must use it in their daily works. Why not for Android and their hardware products? Even FB did droidfooding long time ago...
stronglikedan 2y ago
With the original Wear OS, you could check your notifications at any time and even scroll through them, all without touching the watch. The gestures were amazing. They eventually took them away, for reasons that I cannot comprehend.
- senectus1 2y ago
  yeah, I've been a wearOS owner from the beginning. I wish I has the early OS on the current Galaxy Watch 7 hardware... that would be nearly perfect. Having said that, I don't think I've been happier than with the GW7 I have atm. It does what i want, I can wear it all day and all night and charge it back to 100% in the time it takes me to have a shower get a cuppa and be ready to walk out the door. Its giving me interesting data on sleep and heart rate etc etc (though if I'm honest I'm not sure I'm really using that data for anything)
ho_schi 2y ago
If you’re into sport, I recommend Garmin. It shows notifications properly. Bonus, charge it once or twice in a week. It doesn’t try to be a smartwatch. No sport? I recommend a classy automatic wristwatch. Your movement winds it up. No charging. No apps. No updates. No battery. The spring is wind up by wearing, eight hours of wearing usually last for 24 hours. So sleeping without isn’t an issue and in worst case you can wind up manually. Best purchase of my life. PS: Teached me also other things. Mine has an “old” acrylic glass which I considered first as drawback. It isn’t. It doesn’t break up easily like gorilla glass. And no notifications.
- NotSammyHagar 2y ago
  Yeah! I was going to say, google should just buy the garmin products and add a few more features. Love my garmin products. Great battery life too.
  - scblock 2y ago
    No one wants Google to come in and ruin Garmin the way they ruined fitbit.
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  Seconding the Garmin rec - though stay away from new 265/965/Epic, which have the same OLED screen and resultant "shake it all about" and then wait a blink to see the time issue as Pixels and Apple watches, and stick to Fenix/Forerunner x55 MIPS displays for weeks-long battery life with always-on display. And no need to update every 2 years.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I'm currently using a 965 and I love it. That said, I came to it from fitbit so maybe my views are warped. Generally, just turning over my wrist to look at it works exceptionally well at showing everything, a firm tap works when that doesn't. The 1 to 2 weeklong battery life is also great. It's really one of my favorite watches. My wife has the pixel watch 2 and holy cow does the battery on that thing suck. She never uses the sleep function because the damn thing is empty at the end of every day. Like 14 hours of battery life max in normal usage.
Baeocystin 2y ago
It is also maddening to me the degree to which sensor information is hidden, or simply not available at all. I got my Pixel 2 watch specifically for fitness and sleep tracking. A year on, and I am still completely unable to perform a spot SpO2 check. I'll get a nice, pretty and utterly unlabeled graph of my supposed saturations when I sleep, but that's it. It definitely feels like the people that make it don't actually use the thing.
- modeless 2y ago
  Yeah Fitbit is a toy, not a tool. The graphs are vague and the data behind them is inaccessible. The sensors are unreliable. The metrics are made up. The whole thing is a waste of time. If they ever figure out a way to measure blood sugar or blood pressure, that would actually be useful. Until then I would much prefer a thinner and more comfortable watch without the protruding sensors.
  - hnburnsy 2y ago
    DC Rainmaker did a quick review and the updated running activities looked comparable to Garmin, but no way to export or integrate them out. Of course Garmin is mature for 100+ activities.
- cogman10 2y ago
  If you are a data nerd, Garmin is 1000x better. It tracks everything and the app displays everything. Some of the smart features aren't quiet as good... but like everything I've needed has worked great (like tap and pay).
jayd16 2y ago
All of this plus it doesn't integrate well with G-suite accounts. I can never get my calendar to sync...
dialup_sounds 2y ago
I don't hate my Pixel Watch (yet?) but dear God, getting a text message notification that doesn't actually show you the message is a baffling step backwards coming from a Fitbit.
- modeless 2y ago
  I'm still wearing mine. But I only really get value from two features. One is literally just the vibration motor on my wrist, so I can turn off all sound and vibration on my phone without missing calls and texts. The other is "Extend Unlock" (formerly "Smart Lock") which makes the bad fingerprint reader on my Pixel 7 a non-issue, and is just generally convenient. Funnily enough they're trying to replace "Extend Unlock" with a new feature called "Watch Unlock" and (quite predictably) they screwed up the implementation so bad it's not worth using at all. It's slower than entering my unlock code and annoying because it vibrates the watch every time my phone unlocks, with a random delay. Luckily they didn't actually remove the old "Extend Unlock" feature, they just hid it. I suppose someday they will remove it and I'll have one less reason to wear a smartwatch.
- shawnz 2y ago
  Fitbit has the same behaviour they're describing where the screen only turns on when it detects that you're holding your wrist up. I personally don't have a problem with that behaviour and find it to be a natural gesture. Maybe the Pixel watch isn't as good at recognizing it.
  - modeless 2y ago
    I have always-on display turned on. So the screen is always showing something, just not anything important, like the notification I just got, or the next turn on my navigation route, or whatever. If you ever used a watch that did show notifications automatically with an always-on screen and then went back to one that doesn't, you would probably notice that it's way slower, and also there are many times where you can see the watch screen but it's not convenient to do a gesture.
    - 2y ago
ClassyJacket 2y ago
Android Wear is pretty much abandoned, which is ridiculous considering they're still putting out new Pixel Watches. It's insane that this OS has been around for a decade and pretty much not improved at all. The software still feels the same as it did in 2014 - slow, laggy, and badly designed. Don't get me started on the insanity of making round smartwatches. You wouldn't make a round phone.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  I would never consider a square/rectangular watch, ever, for any reason. Aesthetically (which is super important for a watch) they look ridiculous.
  - ClassyJacket 2y ago
    There is no reason for a smartwatch to be round, ever. It badly hurts functionality. Why would I care more about holding on to a hundreds of years old skeuomorphism than your device actually functioning well?
trog 2y ago
I had a Fitbit Sense for a couple years, before it finally died in the shower. It was just out of warranty. I bought a Fitbit Sense 2 which I thought would be an upgrade but it was amazingly a much worse device. A huge part of it was a similar notifications issue to what you describe - get a notification, raise wrist, and have to wait for a stupid animation to play before displaying the notification. There were a bunch of other problems, including some unbearably stupid ones like it would only work with Alexa and not assistant (wtf who owns fitbit?). I took it back and managed to buy another original Sense. (I posted about them on the Fitbit forum: https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Sense-2/Is-Sense-2-a-downgrade-from-original-Sense/td-p/5436172 https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Sense-2/Is-Sense-2-a-downgra... which seemed to get a bit of agreement from others). My conclusion was that literally nobody working on this watch or responsible for its success actually used one.
ziml77 2y ago
It really sucks to hear this. I was going to once again try swapping back to Android with these new Pixel devices but it sounds like it's going to be a downgrade from the Apple ecosystem. I'm not happy with the things that Apple does with their strong market position created by having such locked down systems, but I'm not going to downgrade my experience solely on principle (also it's not like Google is saintly).
happymellon 2y ago
Pebble was peak smart watch. After my third one broke I had some time where I tried a Galaxy Watch, played with an Apple watch, and finally settled on nothing until there was something that lasted longer than a day. Fitbit Versa being the spiritual successor I moved to, but its frustrating that Google picked them up after i bought it and slowly the software is becoming less reliable. My wife's will keep unpairing from her Pixel, mine is insistent on moving the account from Fitbit to Google but the "account migration" fails so once a month it just logs out. I actively avoid new Google products these days.
- paradox460 2y ago
  Garmin is the spiritual successor to Pebble
Pyrodogg 2y ago
I had one a while ago and notifications, specifically google calendar notications were terrible. While they would appear on the watch they were completely absent from my phone. So if I didn't specifically look at and flip through the watch, and instead looked at my phone there would be zero indication I had a appointment coming up. I'm happy with my Withings Scan watch now. I'm largely passed active-smart watch territory and only passively check the stats on it.

dotnet00 2y ago

Yeah this is very annoying about notifications on my Samsung watch too, probably an android watch issue in general. For me, watch notifications have become just a way to know about particularly important things like email or certain chats. Often my watch will vibrate and I'll just switch to the tab with my mail in it without bothering to wait for the watch. It's crazy how they can't manage to make these work faster. There's more than enough processing power in there, but the software is just so bloated.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mattnewton 2y ago

When I worked at Google I got re-orged into the same division as pixel / android. My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone for personal use, and I am pretty sure I saw an Apple Watch on my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple- I remember several internal sites would ask you to file a radar (bug report) on why you switched to chrome from safari if you opened them in chrome. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices after 5pm. There is a lot of incredible talent in that team but I think Google needs a minor culture shift to compete with Apple here.

tomComb 2y ago
Interacting with Googler's in the past I noticed the same thing but took it a different way. Clearly there was no pressure to use the Google product so they used a wide diversity of devices and services, and I saw this as a healthy thing.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I think that for the rank and file, not needing to use the device is fine. But if you are a manager/product owner/etc (especially over teams in charge of said devices) then YOU specifically should have to use google devices like 24/7 as part of your job. I think it's unhealthy for those in charge not to use the products they sell, especially when talking about consumer goods.
  - summerlight 2y ago
    I think those directors, VPs and PMs should be mandated to use their own products. Okay to keep iPhone, but use Android as well, at least for their corp works. The product quality of Workspace and Chrome is debatable but it's not even remotely comparable to those niche market products because everyone must use it in their daily works. Why not for Android and their hardware products? Even FB did droidfooding long time ago...

stronglikedan 2y ago

With the original Wear OS, you could check your notifications at any time and even scroll through them, all without touching the watch. The gestures were amazing. They eventually took them away, for reasons that I cannot comprehend.

senectus1 2y ago
yeah, I've been a wearOS owner from the beginning. I wish I has the early OS on the current Galaxy Watch 7 hardware... that would be nearly perfect. Having said that, I don't think I've been happier than with the GW7 I have atm. It does what i want, I can wear it all day and all night and charge it back to 100% in the time it takes me to have a shower get a cuppa and be ready to walk out the door. Its giving me interesting data on sleep and heart rate etc etc (though if I'm honest I'm not sure I'm really using that data for anything)

ho_schi 2y ago

If you’re into sport, I recommend Garmin. It shows notifications properly. Bonus, charge it once or twice in a week. It doesn’t try to be a smartwatch. No sport? I recommend a classy automatic wristwatch. Your movement winds it up. No charging. No apps. No updates. No battery. The spring is wind up by wearing, eight hours of wearing usually last for 24 hours. So sleeping without isn’t an issue and in worst case you can wind up manually. Best purchase of my life. PS: Teached me also other things. Mine has an “old” acrylic glass which I considered first as drawback. It isn’t. It doesn’t break up easily like gorilla glass. And no notifications.

NotSammyHagar 2y ago
Yeah! I was going to say, google should just buy the garmin products and add a few more features. Love my garmin products. Great battery life too.
- scblock 2y ago
  No one wants Google to come in and ruin Garmin the way they ruined fitbit.
LeifCarrotson 2y ago
Seconding the Garmin rec - though stay away from new 265/965/Epic, which have the same OLED screen and resultant "shake it all about" and then wait a blink to see the time issue as Pixels and Apple watches, and stick to Fenix/Forerunner x55 MIPS displays for weeks-long battery life with always-on display. And no need to update every 2 years.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I'm currently using a 965 and I love it. That said, I came to it from fitbit so maybe my views are warped. Generally, just turning over my wrist to look at it works exceptionally well at showing everything, a firm tap works when that doesn't. The 1 to 2 weeklong battery life is also great. It's really one of my favorite watches. My wife has the pixel watch 2 and holy cow does the battery on that thing suck. She never uses the sleep function because the damn thing is empty at the end of every day. Like 14 hours of battery life max in normal usage.

Baeocystin 2y ago

It is also maddening to me the degree to which sensor information is hidden, or simply not available at all. I got my Pixel 2 watch specifically for fitness and sleep tracking. A year on, and I am still completely unable to perform a spot SpO2 check. I'll get a nice, pretty and utterly unlabeled graph of my supposed saturations when I sleep, but that's it. It definitely feels like the people that make it don't actually use the thing.

modeless 2y ago
Yeah Fitbit is a toy, not a tool. The graphs are vague and the data behind them is inaccessible. The sensors are unreliable. The metrics are made up. The whole thing is a waste of time. If they ever figure out a way to measure blood sugar or blood pressure, that would actually be useful. Until then I would much prefer a thinner and more comfortable watch without the protruding sensors.
- hnburnsy 2y ago
  DC Rainmaker did a quick review and the updated running activities looked comparable to Garmin, but no way to export or integrate them out. Of course Garmin is mature for 100+ activities.
cogman10 2y ago
If you are a data nerd, Garmin is 1000x better. It tracks everything and the app displays everything. Some of the smart features aren't quiet as good... but like everything I've needed has worked great (like tap and pay).

jayd16 2y ago

All of this plus it doesn't integrate well with G-suite accounts. I can never get my calendar to sync...

dialup_sounds 2y ago

I don't hate my Pixel Watch (yet?) but dear God, getting a text message notification that doesn't actually show you the message is a baffling step backwards coming from a Fitbit.

modeless 2y ago
I'm still wearing mine. But I only really get value from two features. One is literally just the vibration motor on my wrist, so I can turn off all sound and vibration on my phone without missing calls and texts. The other is "Extend Unlock" (formerly "Smart Lock") which makes the bad fingerprint reader on my Pixel 7 a non-issue, and is just generally convenient. Funnily enough they're trying to replace "Extend Unlock" with a new feature called "Watch Unlock" and (quite predictably) they screwed up the implementation so bad it's not worth using at all. It's slower than entering my unlock code and annoying because it vibrates the watch every time my phone unlocks, with a random delay. Luckily they didn't actually remove the old "Extend Unlock" feature, they just hid it. I suppose someday they will remove it and I'll have one less reason to wear a smartwatch.
shawnz 2y ago
Fitbit has the same behaviour they're describing where the screen only turns on when it detects that you're holding your wrist up. I personally don't have a problem with that behaviour and find it to be a natural gesture. Maybe the Pixel watch isn't as good at recognizing it.
- modeless 2y ago
  I have always-on display turned on. So the screen is always showing something, just not anything important, like the notification I just got, or the next turn on my navigation route, or whatever. If you ever used a watch that did show notifications automatically with an always-on screen and then went back to one that doesn't, you would probably notice that it's way slower, and also there are many times where you can see the watch screen but it's not convenient to do a gesture.
  - 2y ago

ClassyJacket 2y ago

Android Wear is pretty much abandoned, which is ridiculous considering they're still putting out new Pixel Watches. It's insane that this OS has been around for a decade and pretty much not improved at all. The software still feels the same as it did in 2014 - slow, laggy, and badly designed. Don't get me started on the insanity of making round smartwatches. You wouldn't make a round phone.

mvdtnz 2y ago
I would never consider a square/rectangular watch, ever, for any reason. Aesthetically (which is super important for a watch) they look ridiculous.
- ClassyJacket 2y ago
  There is no reason for a smartwatch to be round, ever. It badly hurts functionality. Why would I care more about holding on to a hundreds of years old skeuomorphism than your device actually functioning well?

trog 2y ago

I had a Fitbit Sense for a couple years, before it finally died in the shower. It was just out of warranty. I bought a Fitbit Sense 2 which I thought would be an upgrade but it was amazingly a much worse device. A huge part of it was a similar notifications issue to what you describe - get a notification, raise wrist, and have to wait for a stupid animation to play before displaying the notification. There were a bunch of other problems, including some unbearably stupid ones like it would only work with Alexa and not assistant (wtf who owns fitbit?). I took it back and managed to buy another original Sense. (I posted about them on the Fitbit forum: https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Sense-2/Is-Sense-2-a-downgrade-from-original-Sense/td-p/5436172 https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Sense-2/Is-Sense-2-a-downgra... which seemed to get a bit of agreement from others). My conclusion was that literally nobody working on this watch or responsible for its success actually used one.

ziml77 2y ago

It really sucks to hear this. I was going to once again try swapping back to Android with these new Pixel devices but it sounds like it's going to be a downgrade from the Apple ecosystem. I'm not happy with the things that Apple does with their strong market position created by having such locked down systems, but I'm not going to downgrade my experience solely on principle (also it's not like Google is saintly).

happymellon 2y ago

Pebble was peak smart watch. After my third one broke I had some time where I tried a Galaxy Watch, played with an Apple watch, and finally settled on nothing until there was something that lasted longer than a day. Fitbit Versa being the spiritual successor I moved to, but its frustrating that Google picked them up after i bought it and slowly the software is becoming less reliable. My wife's will keep unpairing from her Pixel, mine is insistent on moving the account from Fitbit to Google but the "account migration" fails so once a month it just logs out. I actively avoid new Google products these days.

paradox460 2y ago
Garmin is the spiritual successor to Pebble

Pyrodogg 2y ago

I had one a while ago and notifications, specifically google calendar notications were terrible. While they would appear on the watch they were completely absent from my phone. So if I didn't specifically look at and flip through the watch, and instead looked at my phone there would be zero indication I had a appointment coming up. I'm happy with my Withings Scan watch now. I'm largely passed active-smart watch territory and only passively check the stats on it.