The Samsung Factory watch faces are able to access the Samsung Health App and are able to show the heart BPM. Others have reported that they it doesn’t show it. A lot of the complications have the Title and Text mixed up for Samsung Health and that may be the reason too.
the [HR\ Tag shows the continuous heart rate for both passive and active states, this is in accordance to Wear user face guidelines. Samsung Health only updates the report every 10 minutes by default when in passive mode.
I can understand that the factory watch faces can “do more stuff” than custom WFS faces we create.
However, the fact that (a) it’s possible to select Heart Rate as a complication for this slot, using the Samsung Wearables app on my phone, and (b) the preview in the Wearables app does show the heart rate dummy data there (see my screenshot above), suggests that it’s expected behaviour that the Heart Rate complication will work in this slot.
Otherwise, I’d have to say it’s a bug that the Wearables app shows the preview correctly when it doesn’t work on the watch itself.
And it’s also a bug that the Wearables app shows Heart Rate as an available complication in the first place. If the Heart Rate complication isn’t supported on custom watch faces, then it shouldn’t be possible to select it in the first place. Right?
From the GW4 release, heart rate complication was only working on stock watch faces. Every time I asked about it I was referenced to Samsung Privacy Policy and that they can’t provide HR Complication because their Health API is private. HR complication was only working properly on GW4 pre-release units. Now this complication has Heart Rate + Red Icon, previously it only had Red Heart Icon.
They shouldn’t need to use their proprietary Health API, because HEART_RATE_BPM is one of the Data Types provided by Health Services, which WFS faces should be able to access. And that has nothing to do with Samsung Privacy Policies, as it’s a Google service.
In any case, if HR is not supported, then that makes the current behaviour a bug by definition, as I’m describing here: users are able to see HR as a selectable complication, and the preview shows it working, yet it doesn’t actually work. That’s a bug that needs fixing.
There are countless discussions about same exact things. You don’t know how many times I asked them to finally support these features because I mainly do watch faces with custom complications For some reason, that complication works fully only on stock watch faces.
Stock watches have access to the Samsung Health API. When I read the Samsung Health forum one big complaint is that Samsung does not share all data with Health Connect and probably not to Health Services either.
Also note that sharing with Health Services is something the end user has control over. I think you need to agree to it in the initial set up.
Good news - I just installed the new firmware R960XXU1AWK4 onto my Galaxy Watch6 Classic, and now the heart rate complication correctly displays the heart rate data!
This proves my point, that it actually was and should have been possible to display this data, that it had nothing to do with Privacy Policies, and that it was in fact a bug.
Great that the devs have finally fixed this!
I noticed that the Sleep complication also now correctly shows its data too, where it wasn’t doing so previously.
For some reason, that complication works fully only on stock watch faces.