New Apple Watch owner looking for answers/tips

[thomasliveshere]

Hi everyone,

I received my first Apple Watch today, the Apple Watch Series 2; pretty excited!
I have a few questions as I've never used an Apple Watch before:

- In regards to the use of background app refresh on the watch, is it essential that I have it enabled? For example, if I turn off the background app refresh for weather, does that mean when I view the weather stats on my watch face that it'll be old info?

Furthermore, if I turn off background app refresh for an app on my iPhone, does that also affect the same app on the watch? I'm a bit confused about the advantages and disadvantages of having background app refresh turned on or off, in general, and particularly on the apple watch.

- How does the heart rate feature work? Is it constantly measuring my heart rate even when the app isn't open?

Also, is there any tips or tricks that a new, first time Apple Watch owner should know or would benefit knowing?

Any help/suggestions/advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

[testcard]

Background App Refresh on the Watch seems to be a new feature. Personally, I'd be sparing in which apps I'd choose to Refresh as this could be a battery killer.

 

[kilcher]

Battery should easily get you through the day. If you're worried about that, don't be (unless you're using it to run marathons or something). If I were you I'd use it as is and then make adjustments from there if you need to.

 

[gwhizkids]

Apps will refresh when you open them (such as the Weather app). However, you may notice a brief moment where the spinny thing shows up as the app fetches the latest data. In contrast, if you keep an app in the Dock or (I think) have background app refresh turned on, the app should have near current data as soon as you open it. I found yesterday that my Watch was background refreshing apps like Timer and Clock, which made no sense. So, at @testcard 's suggestion, I went through and toggled off any apps that I did not need immediate data for. Between that and a re-pairing of my Watch (one way to reset things when they go off kilter), I'm seeing a dramatic improvement in my battery life over yesterday.