The gyroscope doesn't work

Reading between the lines of this year's WWDC presentation: What's New in Core Motion, it appears that Apple doesn't intend to give us access to the gyroscope. They don't explicitly say, "the watch doesn't have a gyroscope" or "developers don't have access to the gyroscope", but they do explictly call out "with the accelerometer" whenever they refer to the ability of the watch to access raw sensor data whereas they didn't make this differentiation when talking about the iPhone.

Also, they do explictly say that there is no access to the Device Motion API for the watch which is consistent since this is processed motion data that depends upon the gyroscope.

If I had to speculate, the gyroscope is being taxed full time in order to make the wrist turn activation perform as well as it does. Apple doesn't want to risk sacrificing this performance.

I see.

Thanks🙂

Most likely the reasoning behind not allowing access to the Gyro is due to power consumption. Gyro is quite power hungry and allowing developers access could cause higher levels of battery drain.

The sampling for the wrist detection will be unaffected by providing others with access. The sensor is not directly sampled each time a developer accesses it rather it is sampled at the rate of the highest current requester and then each subscriber is provided with the samples at their requested intervals.