Problem with Stopwatch complication

Watch Face Studio
1

This is the custom watch face I created for my Galaxy 7 watch:

Screenshot_20241222_072640_One UI Watch Home
Screenshot_20241222_072640_One UI Watch Home432×432 36.4 KB

The 55 in yellow is my heart rate, the cyan 49% is of course the battery level, the day/date in pink and the steps in green. I’ve used very large characters everywhere to accommodate my 71 year-old eyes.

I also have a complication showing the stopwatch in orange text in the upper right. The hundredths of a second display after the decimal point falls off the screen, but that’s by design since hundredths is just a distraction. But strangely this number does not update as the stopwatch is running but updates only when you hit stop. What? How useless is that? I wanted to use this to track the duration of my trail running, but it needs to update continuously to be any use. This must be an oversight, right? I can put all kinds of esoteric stuff on the watch face such as acceleration, moon phase, sunrise, sunset, body composition, and more, but I can’t display a stopwatch ???

Of course I tried using the green running button on the watch, which gives me a screen that looks like this:

Screenshot_20241221_204006_Samsung Health
Screenshot_20241221_204006_Samsung Health432×432 20.1 KB

I can read the duration just fine, although again the hundredths of a second is a distraction. I’m often interested in my heart rate, which fortunately is displayed here, but alas it’s too small for me to read. I can barely read it if I stop my run and squint for a bit but I don’t want to do that. I can also read it if I have my reading glasses on, but that is uncomfortable, not to mention even dangerous while trail running. (The heart rate on my watch face is twice this size and I can easily read it without my reading glasses). Also occasionally I want to know the time of day, which is shown at the top in microscopic type. Frankly that’s so small I didn’t even know it was there until doing this screen capture. I guess the 20 somethings who are designing the watch can see this, but do they really like it this small? Perhaps they get extra style points for seeing how small they can make it. And BTW, I went to settings and selected the largest font size as well as bold, but it doesn’t help with this.

The watch is nice and I love being able to store music files and listen to them on my earbuds without having to lug my phone with me … but the main reason I bought it was for trail running and it doesn’t really show what I need.

I don’t know enough about Android programming to fix this kind of thing on my own, but could someone well versed in the art design an app that could do what I need? Or perhaps is there already such an app out there that I could download?

Is it likely that a future version of wear OS will fix the problems with the stop watch complication?

2

Most third-party complications are only allowed to update once every five minutes, unless a particular event occurs. Complications from OEMs can be exempt, so try using one of those if you’re not already.

3

It seems like you are suggesting I could use a different stopwatch complication.
I know of only one way to pick a complication, and that is to choose one from the list in the customize watch face section of the android wear OS app. There is about 70 complications to choose from in this list and only one of them is a stopwatch. Also I don’t see any mechanism to add more complications to this list. When I choose the heart rate complication from this list, it can update the watch face every second so I know at least some complications can do this. Am I wrong in assuming the stopwatch complication is simply broken?

4

Complications can be added from the Play Store, but most of those probably won’t be allowed to update more than once every five minutes. The complication you’re using could be broken if it’s an OEM one.

Could it be that the real issue is that complications don’t update when the watch enters ambient (AOD) mode?

5

It’s true that complications don’t seem to update in ambient mode, but that wasn’t my problem here. This stopwatch complication doesn’t update ever. One time I waited an hour and the complication still did not update! Eventually I discovered an app on the play store called Google clock that adds a stopwatch complication. It’s much better for several reasons. One is that when the it’s reset to 0, the complication displays “Start” instead of “Stopwatch” which takes up way less room on the watch face. Also when you hit start, it starts right away (with no other button pushes needed. But most importantly it actually works! That is, the watch face updates every second showing the current elapsed time (assuming the display is on). Samsung is doing their customers a disservice putting this complication in the default list on the Galaxy 7 since it flat out doesn’t work. If they can’t fix it they should just remove it or perhaps replace it with Google’s complication. That would have saved me a few hours trying to get it to work when it was hopeless all along. Does Samsung have a forum where users can make suggestions of things they need to fix?

6

Hello,
Please report this to the Developer Support so that the particular Development team can check this out.

Thanks
Shamima