Wesley's Tool-Box

After I installed watchOS 2 beta 4 when it came out on July 22, 2015 (July 21 at Apple HQ), my Apple Watch felt more sluggish than usual. Even the terrible beta 1 wasn't like this. What's worse, the watch froze up after a few hours. I noticed that it'd never last more than 4 hours at a time, requiring a forced restart (pressing side button and digital crown together for 10 seconds) to get it working again.

I tried resetting and restoring, then resetting and setting up the device as new. Neither fixed the issue. Somehow, this beta was unusable on my watch. If this problem was happening to everyone, I would've heard about it and Apple would be pulling the beta, but this wasn't the case. Most people were actually saying it worked better than previous betas, which baffled me. Then I eventually found someone else having the same problem.

It turns out, having the watch face set to "Simple" was the culprit. Using another watch face ("Modular" was recommended) supposedly solved the problem. So I changed the face to Modular and indeed the problem went away. I had been using the Simple face for nearly 3 months, so I never thought of changing it to anything else. Who knew a bug in the beta would force me to do otherwise?

Using Simple face on beta 4 had serious impact on battery life as well - about as bad as the infamous beta 1. Also, it kept consuming battery while the device froze up, too. I went to sleep with the fully charged watch, only to find out that it froze up about two hours in, and had 37% of charge left after 5 hours when I woke up. So I'm guessing the watch face steadily hogged system resources until everything else became inoperable, but kept going.

So if any of the developers with watchOS 2 beta 4 are experiencing lock ups and slow performance, avoid Simple watch face and switch to something different before resetting your watch.