The Apple Watch Is Missing One Crucial Feature

Hot take alert: the Apple Watch is not only the best watch you can buy, but the only watch you need.

Of course, I understand how much people love their old-fashioned timepieces, But at the end of the day, a watch is a tool — one meant to provide critical information at a glance. At first, that was just the time; then it became time and date, time and day, time in multiple places, time spent underwater, and so forth. With the Apple Watch, you can see almost everything. My default face tells me not just time and date, but the sun’s position, the temperature, the precipitation, my compass direction, my next appointment and how active I’ve been, all at a glance.

But as indispensable as these features make it (it’s the only timepiece I’ve worn since I bought it three-plus years ago) the Apple Watch does manage to be uniquely infuriating when it decides it’s smarter than I am. Specifically, I’m talking about the Fitness features.

As I write this, I’m sitting nursing a low-grade fever, with aches and malaise spread throughout my body and the occasional chill sending me running for the blankets. My doctor would no doubt tell me the best approach is to park my ass on the couch for the rest of the day and let my white blood cells go to work; my partner is in the midst of planning a full soup-and-Nyquil assault on my illness.

But my Apple Watch, meanwhile, will harass me many times over the course of the day, telling me that “you just need to do some light exercise every hour for the next three and you’ll close your Exercise ring,” or the accursed “Time to stand!” And then, come the end of the week, when my Watch sends me a Fitness status report, it’ll mock my lack of movement by not just showing the days when I failed to meet my goals, but prompt me to “aim for six days next week.”

Will Sabel Courtney

Sure I could set it to Do Not Disturb and avoid the notifications, but that would also involve muting all my other notifications — my texts, my calls, my Slack alerts, etc. That’s just not really a feasible option in this day and age for most of us.

It’s hard not to wonder if Apple sees this inability to temporarily deactivate Fitness goals as a feature, not a bug. See, Apple’s approach to fitness involves gamification — in effect turning you into a first-person avatar of yourself. The Move, Exercise and Stand bars on your Watch are little more than reverse health bars from a video game; complete your tasks and challenges and watch them climb and climb until they finally complete with a spinning, sparkly effect straight out of Dr. Strange. The deeper it sinks its hooks into you, the more likely you are to be invested and keep using it — and, a cynical man might add, sign up for Apple Fitness+. Gamification works both ways; you feel great when you win, but you feel awful when you lose.

But it’s not very considerate of people taking much-needed days off from their fitness journey, be it for sickness or simple post-workout recovery. Taking time to recharge every so often is crucial for the human body, yet Apple’s Health app seems to have forgotten to provide a way to do that. How hard would it be to install a simple feature to give you a day off? “Siri, I’m sick today” or “Siri, I’m taking a recovery day” should be all it takes to put the Fitness app’s expectations away for 24 hours or so.

If Apple is worried about people abusing the privilege and using it as an excuse to neglect their health goals — which, if so, I would respond with, hey Tim Cook, why do you care how I use my watch once I bought it? — then maybe the world’s greatest software engineers can find a way to make it tricky to disable. Hide it behind multiple menus, if you want. Make it a Shortcut we have to trigger with the Action Button.

Just give us some sort of option, so we don’t have to deal with the guilt of not closing our rings every single damn day.

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