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danmart

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 24, 2015
1,557
1,051
Lancs, UK
A weird and slightly funny thing that might be of interest more widely…

My wife has a Series 9 Watch and we turned on the ‘Double Tap’ feature for her to try out, though she pretty much forgot about this feature. One of her hobbies is needle felting, which involves repeatedly stabbing wool to form it into felt creations. She has become really quite skilled at it.

Yesterday, she was doing a session of felting and when I walked by she commented that her watch was acting strange and ‘showing her weird symbols’. Naturally I asked her to show me her watch and it was indeed doing strange things. I guessed it might be the action of the needle felting causing the Double Tap feature to work, and asked her to take the watch off thinking that the locking action would interrupt the series of cached commands. Nope. When we tried to put the PIN in for her watch it started doing random number presses, causing every login to fail. It also made it impossible to turn off the watch since that now seems to only be possible through software actions?

The anti-failed login started to kick in and the watch started demanding longer periods of time between attempts, but even six hours later it was still going through the failed login loop. In a bit of desperation I looked at the Watch app on her iPhone to see if there was any way there of breaking the cycle. I saw that you can disable Double Tap from the paired iPhone so we did that (and it seemed to end the attempted inputs), but by then the lockout had reached eight hours!

We put her watch to the side and decided to turn it off thinking that the lockout counter would keep going. Nope again, when we powered up the watch after a night’s sleep it was still demanding we wait eight hours until we try to login again.

But, after that it did indeed let her login to the Watch again, having been locked out for about 18 hours all told.

So, if you like needle felting, I recommend not using Double Tap!
 
Last edited:

Saturn007

macrumors 65816
Jul 18, 2010
1,449
1,316
Good heads-up — informative and well written.

We have a knitter in the family. Knitting wreaks havoc as to the Move ring — wish Apple would figure out how to distinguish major calorie burning activity from knitting — or, iPad scrolling or game playing!

Haven't turned on or tried double tap yet, but this could well affect knitting, too!

Thanks for your alert!
 

FreakinEurekan

macrumors 603
Sep 8, 2011
5,597
2,668
Actually what you’re describing sounds more like “ghost touch” to me, which is mentioned on a front-page article today. Verify up to date on watchOS 10.4; if it happens again force-restart the watch by pressing & holding the button & Digital Crown until you see an Apple logo.
 
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danmart

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 24, 2015
1,557
1,051
Lancs, UK
You may well be right - I had the same thought after seeing that article. It was a new one on me at the time however!
 
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