tl;dr I don’t see drafts created on my watch in the iPhone inbox widget until after I’ve opened the iPhone app, which means I’m not getting a necessary visual cue that I have work waiting for me in the inbox. I’m trying to figure out if this is a me thing or a limitation.
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I was planning to use the watch to capture thoughts throughout my day, and then use the inbox widget to see what new drafts I had created from the watch later.
I’m hella scatterbrained, so the purpose of the widget is to put a visual cue right in front of me that inbox is not zero.
However, because it doesn’t refresh items unless I open the app, I’m not getting that cue, and so won’t open the app to do any work, and so the widget stays forever empty.
I have BG App Refresh on for Drafts
Is this a general limitation with widgets? The Drafts app? Or is this a pebkac? (Problem exists between keyboard and computer)
Interestingly, if I change the system font to bold in the phone settings and back, the widget refreshes and shows the new watch drafts. So it smells like some issue with refresh triggers.
Several stages involved here, could be several things, but, my tl;dr is that there’s a lot of system scheduling between creation of a draft on the watch, and a Widget on the phone being updated.
When you create a draft on the watch, Drafts immediately tells watchOS it has data it wants to send to the phone. In most cases, if the phone is nearby, has a good connection, and both the watch and phone have good battery life, that update happens pretty immediately – but it’s non-deterministic and watchOS may delay the update to do a lot of the battery saving tricks it employs - like batching multiple apps’ updates, etc., or throttling an apps requests if it feels like the app is doing to much.
Once watchOS-iOS do send the update, Drafts on the phone runs in the background syncs the data, and requests an update to it’s Widgets. Again, which is subject to iOS scheduling and throttling. If an app’s widgets have recently been updated, iOS will often hold off on updating them again.
In the best cases, this all works well…but I’ve also seen iOS just stop updating an app’s widgets entirely for a while. It’s also often the case if you are actively testing a function like this and watching it you are actively pushing a lot of updates and the system decided the app is being battery hungry and just ignores the updates for a while…making the problem seem worse than it is.
If you are consistently seeing it not update, in good conditions, I’d try rebooting both the phone and watch to reset the scheduling and see how it goes.
I was just about to reply and say that rebooting both devices has helped. There’s still lag, but not the several hours lag I was seeing before. Averaging ~10 minutes now, which is good enough for and first thing the next day/end of day triage session.
Thanks a ton.