Pro-tip: Use Android Wear Theater mode to avoid accidental unlocks & watch face screen

Owners of Android Wear watches: Does your device, without your intention, regularly go to menu for choosing a watch face? Maybe you’re crossing your arms and you feel a buzz thinking it might be alerting you to a new text message only to see your watch on that darned menu again? I don’t have a real fix for you, but there’s something you might want to try that may alleviate your frustration.

The problem seems to lie in the long press shortcut that activates the menu for choosing and adjusting watch faces. A combination of sensitive wrist gesture recognition plus the short amount of time it takes to activate long press recognition means that activating your device through any arm motion and then touching a part of your body can lead to accidentally launching of the watch face menu, which seems to be why the most common anecdote is that it happens when one crosses their arms.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an option from within the Settings app on Android Wear to adjust or disable long presses, even though inside Settings there’s a button to get to the watch face menu. The best option for now is enabling Theater mode.

Enable Theatre mode

With Theater mode, no brushing of your skin against the screen or raising of your wrist will activate your watch. With this mode it takes 3 quick taps in succession to turn on the screen – or if your device has a power button, one press of the power button will temporarily light up the screen. You can enable it by swiping down to open the Lollipop notifications menu, swiping left once, and then tapping on Theater mode once to toggle it. Or, if your device has a physical button, you can just double-press.

But this is really more of a compromise than a solution. If you want the frictionless joy of wrist gestures, this won’t help you. So what seems necessary, then, is that Google really just needs to add an option in the Settings menu to disable long presses.

Besides the simply ability to conveniently change faces, one theory is that perhaps the long press is a feature that’s partially meant as a convenience for developers who are testing ever-changing watch face code, so they don’t have to go to the Settings menu every time they want their device to reset and pull down new code for their watch face. It’s a possibility, but either way there’s one thing you can try to protest Google to release a fix: report it through the Android Wear app on your smartphone. From the app, visit Settings > Help & Feedback > Feedback (at the very bottom).

Maybe if enough of us voice our concern they’ll listen.