This small change makes a huge difference to the Apple Watch Ultra 2

There is one annoyance we haven’t been able to overcome with the power of positive thinking, however. When you’ve got the Watch Ultra 2 set to automatically figure out when you’re working out and record it, it doesn’t just quietly start doing this the way you might hope. Instead, it pops up an annoying dialogue on the screen, asking you whether it should indeed do the very thing you told it to do automatically.

(Technically, you can only tell Apple Watches to “remind” you to start recording a workout, rather than tell them to automatically start recording a workout. Why Apple made this distinction is a mystery.)

This dialogue box can be extremely irritating when you’re in the middle of exercising, especially if you’re in the middle of an activity such as cycling, which engages both your hands.

There have been times when I’ve been using the turn-by-turn navigation on the Watch Ultra 2, only to have that stupid dialogue box pop up so I can no longer see the navigation screen, forcing me to stop riding to get the navigation back.

Even when I’m not using navigation, it’s awkward and sometimes a little bit dangerous to take a hand off the handlebars, reach across to the other hand and try to tell the watch, yes of course I effing want you to record my workout. Why else would I have told you to automatically record it, if I didn’t want it recorded automatically?

It’s annoyances like that this new “double-tap gesture” helps you deal with. Rather than reach across the handlebars (or whatever), you just tap your thumb and forefinger on the watch-wearing hand together twice in rapid succession, and it’s like you just tapped on the screen.

It works for incoming calls, it works for scrolling through notifications, it works for pausing and playing music in the Apple Music app (though, sadly, not in Google’s YouTube Music), it works in podcasts, in the compass app. It works in all sorts of useful places.

The double-tap gesture takes very little getting used to, and in the week or so we’ve been testing it (we installed the beta version a week ahead of today’s official launch), it’s worked as advertised almost all the time.

Sometimes it’s been more like a quadruple tap, or (when my hands are too cold from riding to tap quickly enough) even a sextuple or octuple tap, but even then, it’s still better than having to reach across the handlebars.

(And, yes, I’ve checked with Apple, and there’s no other way to get rid of the annoying reminder dialogue, other than turn off automatic exercise detection altogether.)

The only thing not to like about the new double-tap gesture is it’s only available on the new Watch models. Apple says that’s because it needs the extra processing power afforded by the new S9 SiP chip on this year’s models, but we don’t believe that for a moment.

Previous Watch models supported a very similar feature, designed for people who, for whatever reason, can’t tap on the screens of their watches, and clearly those older models had the processing power for that.

For the benefit of people with old models, we spent a week trying out that old “Assistive Touch” feature, but found it much too intrusive to be used for mere convenience.

You really have to need to use Assistive Touch to not be annoyed by it, and it’s a constant annoyance, not just an occasional one like the stupid reminder dialogue popping up asking if you want the watch to do the thing you already told it to do.