WearOS

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2014–2025), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with WearOS, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

Calls route to the wrong device and Maps on the watch gets stuck on starting navigation2025-05-14
Circular screen cuts off text, leaving only a small square area usable for reading messages2025-05-13
Software feels slow and laggy to interact with on the watch2024-08-13
Screens are oversized with excess padding, showing much less information than before2024-01-28
Wear OS has bad UX and performance-sucking design decisions2023-12-13
Watch operating system described as absolutely unusable, with no specific problem named2023-10-05
Android smartwatches are so slow they become unusable2021-01-02
Scrolling to the bottom auto-navigates to another article, and scrolling up doesn't return2018-03-15
Swiping to change watch faces is annoying, making needed information hard to reach2018-03-15
User feels lost; swipe directions give unpredictable results and screens appear unexpectedly2016-03-25
The interface is confusing and cluttered, hard to make sense of2016-01-31
Some notifications never disappear and notifications sometimes stop arriving entirely2014-08-03