Tuesday, November 5, 2024

apple watch – What functionality is lost when wrist detection is disabled on watchOS?

TL;DR -> I deactivated Wrist Detection in order to use some features on my tattooed arm and want to know the drawbacks of that.


So, I received my first Apple Watch today, but as soon as I started using I noticed that may not be so cool as I wished. I found that a lot of features wouldn’t be available since I have both arms sleeved. My main concerns are:

  1. I cannot use passcode because every time the screen turns off or I move my arm, the watch requires code to be usable again.
  2. Without having passcode I can’t use the watch to pay by contactless (which I want so bad) and cannot installs apps directly from the store on AW.
  3. I cannot record any activity because since the device don’t identify my wrist, every time I put my arm down, it automatically pauses the activity.
  4. I cannot use the Always On.
  5. I cannot use Double Tap.

Well, I find some answers on Apple Watch subreddit, including one that uses a plastic patch on the sensor (which I think its ridiculous bearing in mind the price of this gadget), and deactivating the Wrist Detection.

Discarding the first option, I decided to deactivate the Wrist Detection and surprisingly everything worked fine: activities, double tap and always on, BUT, Apple Watch said to me that deactivating this option I will lose the tracking of heart beating, blood oxygen background measurements, sleep monitoring, noise measurements, etc. including double tap (which is very odd, because the only way double tap works for me is with wrist detection off).

I seek experience from others that use their watch with detection disabled.

I’m particularly keen to measure my heart (which looks fine when I use the manual measurement at least) and track my sleep (I don’t have a chance to sleep yet to know what will happen).

What functions won’t work when I tell my watch not to detect my wrist?

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