Samsung’s universal gestures for Galaxy Watch offer more functionality than Apple’s double-tap

One of the features that was advertised at the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra Watch 2 launch was the support for a double-tap gesture that launched with WatchOS 10.1. Apple’s S9 chip enables this gesture capability and it can be quite useful for snoozing alarms, playing and pausing audio, and more. However, it is also fairly limited and one often resorts to using a finger to tap away on the display.

In celebration of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Samsung posted a press release reminding all of us Samsung Galaxy Watch owners that Samsung had this same gesture, and a few more, available with the One UI 5.1 update that came with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 wearables in August.

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I bought a Galaxy Watch 6 Classic and never saw that Samsung supported these gesture actions as part of its accessibility offerings. I dusted off my Watch 6 Classic, charged it up, and have been exploring these gestures on the watch.

In order to enable these gestures, you need to enable it from the watch itself. Navigate to settings and then tap on “Accessibility,” then “Interaction and dexterity,” and then finally “Universal gestures.” Toggle the slider to “On” and then you will be prompted to start a tutorial on their use. You can also choose to skip the tutorial if you want. The tutorial is useful and confirms that the gestures you are making are valid and recognized.

Four gestures are supported by Samsung, including make a fist, make a fist twice, pinch, and double-pinch. The double-pinch gesture is the same as Apple’s double-tap while the others are self-explanatory. Default actions are next item, previous item, tap, and action menu. Activating the cursor scan capability is very interesting where you move your watch side to side and back and forth to move the cursor around the display, making the entire device a single-hand operation.

You can also revisit the Gestures option in settings and customize the action of the gestures if you find something more useful than the default setup. Other actions available include “go to previous screen,” “open Bixby,” and “app launcher.”

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The activation gesture that turns on this accessibility functionality can also be customized. Options include “auto activate when the screen is on,” “shake gesture,” “knock-knock gesture,” and “nod gesture.” When the function is enabled, a yellow color line highlights the selection area on the display. In typical fashion, you can also change the color of this focus indicator.

Apple provides a simple, always-on functionality with limited use cases while Samsung provides a customizable platform with multiple gestures. At this time the gestures have shown to be reliable in responding to my movements and further exploration is clearly needed. If you haven’t yet tried this universal gesture capability out on your Galaxy Watch, this might be the time to try, especially if you plan to wear gloves this winter and want to control your watch with gestures.