How to change double tap on the Apple Watch

Double Tap in Assistive Touch Revisited: Resolving the Puzzles of Dialing and Answering Phones on Apple Watches

The cool Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 feature was not available when the watches were launched last month. Double tap, which finally arrives today via the watchOS 10.1 update, lets you interact with the watch without ever needing to use the touchscreen. With a quick pinching motion, you can use it to scroll through the new smart stack of widgets in watchOS 10, pause or end timers, skip music tracks, and answer phone calls. It is sort of a feature that you may not think about until you have your groceries in your car, and a call comes through on your watch.

The answers from that internal research were then iterated multiple times, taking into consideration different types of testers. Some were new to the gesture, but others were experts in the field, and others were more familiar with it. That extensive feedback process is also why double tap is no longer called double pinch in Assistive Touch.

What do smartwatches tell us about their actions? The case of Apple Watch’s double tap gesture points at a new way to use wearables

That’s not as simple as it sounds, and if you know anything about Wearable sensors, that is. Wrist data is incredibly tricky to work with because there’s a lot of noise in the signal. On top of calculating how light reflects off of blood pumping through your veins, smartwatch algorithms have to account for your arm (plus muscles, veins, and tendons) physically moving around during different activities like walking, running, and gesticulating. There are no two people with the same body. Differences in wrist size and limb length have to be taken into consideration.

When you do a gesture, we can detect it. When you’re doing something that’s close to a tap, or a double tap, we’re not automatically triggering the gesture. tuning these things with the right scenarios is what we need to make sure we detect the right thing.

The watch must be able to differentiate between activities when someone is in motion, the type of activities they are doing and what features they may be using on the watch at a given time. Streaming music or taking calls might seem unrelated to double tap, but the algorithm must be able to account for the noise introduced by subsystems like LTE and Bluetooth. That’s harder to do well when everything is done on the main CPU.

That’s the technical side of the equation. But practically speaking, it’s easier to see how Assistive Touch and double tap differ once you try using both.

“We don’t think of it necessarily as ‘Hey, there are four available gestures here.’ It’s that audience needs the ability to customize those gestures in a way that you don’t because your ability goes further than what they might be able to do.”

According to testing, when you tell someone to pinch, they hold the lower part of the gesture more than they release. Charles explained that the simple name change led to testers performing the gesture more accurately.

In talking with Clark and Charles, it’s clear Apple went through such a tedious process because this is supposed to be one of those magical features that “just works.”

Source: The Apple Watch’s double tap gesture points at a new way to use wearables

Double Tap in Multitasking and Third-party Apps: A Simple Rule for Using Smart Widgets in Third-Party Apps

Double tap can be short in multitasking. If I want to pause a timer but have navigated away from that app, I have to either use my other hand or use Siri. I can use double tap to end the timer if I wait for it to go off.

That lack of choice is also apparent in third-party apps. Even though my email app allows me to double-tap to start a quick reply, I am not controlling my emails. Apps like Spotify and Pocket Casts don’t work with double tap, either. Most third-party apps that do work with double tap just let you dismiss notifications. That’s helpful but still limiting.

You can scroll through your list ofWidgets if you choose Advance with the Smart Stack. That is pretty straightforward. Select may need a bit of thought. Select will make the app to launch in the Smart Stack. Apple thinks it can surface the most relevant widget to the top at a given time. It takes a little time to get used to this type of artificial intelligence.

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Clark states that customization can be a powerful tool, but it’s where more complexity can come into the process. Clark means what he says. Not everyone, after all, has the patience to set up dozens of Focus modes or tinker with Shortcuts. If you want to keep things simple, you inevitably have to narrow the focus.

It doesn’t always work that seamlessly. Sometimes the primary action isn’t what I want to do, and sometimes I have to use my other hand. (In the above example, once I ask Siri to open the app, I may have to scroll with the digital crown to reach the information I need.) It is not difficult to see how future versions of double tap can scroll and select. Something that’s not quite as comprehensive as Assistive Touch but strikes a finer balance between simplicity and customizability — without relying too much on Apple trying to figure out what it is you want to do.

I don’t think a single gesture can do that alone — there’s a reason computer mice have a left and right button, scroll wheels, single clicks, double clicks, and trackballs for the sickos. But if the S9 SiP can handle a double tap, maybe single and triple taps aren’t too far off. And we could have a lot of fun.

The only way to play this up is within Apple’s Music andPodcast apps. (In the latter, skip moves your forward 30 seconds in an episode.) If you try to use Spotify, Pocket Casts, or any other third-party media app, it doesn’t do anything. Double tap with third-party apps is limited to notifications.

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That’s it. Again, I wish you could customize more, but you can’t at this point in time. This feature is new, and could be Apple’s way of opening up options in the future. You should play around with the settings to see what works best for you.