Unauthoritative Pronouncements

For a long time there was the Siri face, and now there’s this Smart Stack face which is basically the same thing. However, now it claims my Watch in ways that are frankly irritating. When I look at my Watch I want to see my Watch face. I use Modular, and it’s laid out with complications in specific places so I can glance at my Watch and see what I want without having to interact with it. Things like the weather. The Smart Stack can’t show me the Weather and my Lyft ride at the same time, that’s just too much information density for the poor little guy.

The Smart Stack asserts itself on two occasions: Media playback, of any sort, where it takes over the screen to show you the card-stack thing of the media playback controls with the date and time. The other occasion is during live activities, like when I took a Lyft ride today and it decided all I wanted to know was the ETA from Lyft, the date and time.

When I complained about the media thing before I was directed by some people in the Relay or Six Colors Discord to the Watch app on the iPhone to Smart Stack -> Media Apps -> and then change it from “Smart Stack” to “App” if you wanted the old Now Playing behavior, or just turn it off completely.

The Apple Watch, for some reason, has never included a Now Playing complication. I don’t know why. You can add a complication for Music, or a complication for Overcast, but you can’t have a complication for Now Playing that covers all media playback.

You have to tap that tiny, impossible-to-hit dot of an icon for what’s currently playing at the top of your screen if you want to get to the playback controls. A mind-boggling decision, surely, but you get to have your Watch face be your Watch face and not a Smart Stack.

I know people like the Smart Stack, it’s just not what I want at all and there aren’t any helpful accommodations made for people that want to always keep their Watch face at the forefront. I would give up one of my Modular complication spots for a Live Activities spot if that’s something they wanted to offer, but it seems like that’s not in the cards.

Of course, that goes back to the whole mess of the Apple Watch’s poor Watch face selection. New Watch faces come out, and old ones wither. Pride Watch faces come out every year, and every year someone at Apple decides to be homophobic and not let gay people have complications (or more than one) on the Pride faces. Give us Pride Modular (I know you can pick the rainbow gradient in Modular but that’s not a Pride rainbow, that’s a ClarisWorks 2.0 radial gradient.)

The way Apple decided to get around their graveyard of old Watch faces it to simply override the current Watch face with the Smart Stack. Problem solved! Whatever it was you liked or found useful about your Watch face gets completely overridden by something that can only display the date, the time, and one card that it thinks is most important. You have to scroll through the Smart Stack to see if what you want is in there, or dismiss it each time. This completely ruins the glanceability of the device turning it into a thing you have to fiddle with like you’re tuning a tiny violin.

This is totally different from how I feel about my iPhone 16 Pro with the Dynamic Island showing Live Activities —because everything else on the screen is what it should be so it’s win-win. I know the Watch is too small for a “Dynamic Island” but those clever boffins at Apple have to have another idea to retain the current Watch face while supplementing it with Live Activities in some fashion (like my suggestion of making it a type of complication).

For now, I’ve actually turned Live Activities off on my Watch, which seems like cutting off my nose to spite my Watch face.