Chris Hamady

I've had an Apple Watch now for nearly two years. Overall, I absolutely love it. One little glitch with Messages on the watch has been bugging me though, and I believe that I have finally figured out the issue (after a suggestion from my wife that I actually look at the Messages' settings, which incidentally, are on the Apple Watch app located on the iPhone).

Let me first start by saying that I'm not sure if this was a bug, a glitch, or a configuration error on my part. All I know is that frequently I would receive a message on my watch, and then immediately hit the "voice to text" button to create a reply. The reply would immediately default to being sent via my Twitter SMS feed rather than the active incoming Messages thread. Normally, I would catch it prior to sending crazy messages to Twitter. Today, I did not. NOTE: If you don't have Twitter sending updates to your phone via SMS, you probably haven't noticed this issue.   

Here is what I think is going on. By default, Apple Watch Messages are set to mirror Messages on your iPhone. Whatever messages are at the top of Messages on your iPhone move to the top of Messages on the Apple Watch. After a number of Twitter updates posting to Messages on my iPhone and Apple Watch via the Messages app, if I would receive a text message from someone, the following would occur:

If I didn't manually make sure that I was posting a reply on the correct thread and instead just hit the voice to text button, I think the Twitter thread at the top of the iPhone Messages app was causing the Apple Watch to (mirror) switch to that thread in the middle of my dictation. If I clicked send at that point, the message would go to Twitter instead of the Messages thread I was trying to respond to. I realize that Messages on the iPhone should have switched to the incoming chat thread and stop this behavior, but I think this could potentially be a bug. 

Turning off Mirroring, switching to Custom, in the Messages section of the Apple Watch app on my iPhone seems to have corrected this issue. If there is another explanation that I am missing, please add it to the comments and I will update this blog.

CH