CycleBridgeOn the Apple Watch · Apple Watch
It asks who owns GPS, every ride
A bike computer that dies at hour three is not a bike computer. Battery life is the constraint the Apple Watch app is built around, and the single biggest lever is whether the watch runs its own GPS at all.
What it shows
- Two choices at the start of every ride: Phone GPS, or Watch GPS
- The previous answer pre-selected, so the usual case is one press
- A battery saver switch that slows the readout and refuses watch GPS outright
Choose Phone GPS and the watch never starts location services — not started and ignored, never instantiated. It sends heart rate and elapsed time, and receives speed and distance back from the phone so it can still show you a full readout.
The question is asked per ride rather than set once because the honest answer changes per ride: the phone is usually on the bars, but not always.
The readout also slows itself down when nobody is looking. Wrist down, the screen refreshes once a minute — which is all watchOS redraws a dimmed screen anyway — and snapshots that have not meaningfully changed are not transmitted at all.
Every one of those decisions lives in a single tested type rather than scattered through the app, so they can be argued with and changed in one place.