OmniFocus on my watch has got to the point where nearly every time I open it, it takes a few minutes to sync. During that time, the UI tends to lock up and freeze. I end up getting my phone out because it’s simply much faster to do that than to wait for the watch. I’m on watchOS 11 on a Series 7. Every other app I use has reasonable performance. And of course, I remember OmniFocus working just fine in the early 2010s when I ran it on an iPod touch which had less memory and a worse CPU!
I do archive my database on my Mac every month, so while it’s a good size it’s not unreasonable.
Is the performance mostly affected by database size in MB? Number of items? CPU of the watch regardless of database size? Is there anything else I can do from another device to improve performance? As much as I loved the switch to a full copy of the app on the watch, with this kind of performance I find myself missing the “remote view” architecture of OmniFocus 3.
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This is a point of frustration for me as well. The watch app is stellar in its features and wonderful: a well thought-through companion. Just wished it synced faster. I totally get not really syncing in the background a lot due to Apple’s third-party sync/day limitations. I wish that when I open OmniFocus on the Apple Watch that it syncs in 3-4 seconds, not 30-40.
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That really isn’t a fair comparison. In 14 years while hardware has got faster, code changes too and becomes more demanding to make use of the hardware.
With the Watch App, watchOS is very protective of what is running and will kill an app if it thinks it’s using too much battery, I don’t think that background syncing is allowed on watchOS either. So when the app opens, it needs to sync the data to ensure it’s up to date…
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I’m wondering how Marco Arment sped up the Overcast Watch app - which is MUCH faster and more reliable now. He rewrote it.
There might be lessons to learn - but I suspect Omni Group have learnt all those.
I realized I didn’t say - much of the time, when there’s a large sync the UI becomes completely unresponsive. Anyone else see that too?
I have not seen that actually. I had imported over 300 items to the Inbox at one point and while it took a bit to sync, it was not completely unresponsive (I could still scroll the Digital Crown, for example).
I’ve had the watch app get slower over a period of weeks/months and found that re-installing just fixes it.
The watch seems to restore any uses of OF widgets so it’s not particularly painful. You only have to go into the OF watch app settings and set up your favourite perspectives again.
You could also de-register the previous watch install as a sync client but it goes away on its own after a while.
I’ve given up using Omnifocus for anything on my watch, an Ultra 2. I basically watch I sync’ing to show me what I know I need to do, because I’ve got my phone out. I’ve re-installed it a few times. I’ve just given up with it
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Good idea! This seems to have made a big difference for me. That makes it seem like there’s an issue like the local database getting fragmented or similar. We’ll see how long it lasts.
