Q: How do I make my Apple Watch send sound to my earphones by default instead of my iPhone?

A: Heck if I know.¹ But I have got an okayish workaround:

1. create earphone-connecting shortcut(s) for your Apple Watch, and
2. add those shortcuts as complications to the watch face of your choice.

I have two pairs of Shokz earphones, so I created one shortcut for each.

(For grins, I also created a “Low Power” shortcut to turn off Cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth all at once.)

Step-by-step, here’s what I did.

1] In Apple’s Shortcuts app on your iPhone or iPad, create a new Shortcut with three actions:

Quick notes:

• for some reason, you gotta do this on an iOS device (eg, an iPhone or an iPad). Try to do it in MacOS (eg, on a MacBook) and the Shortcuts app won’t let you create the “Set playback destination” step ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• customize the third step’s device as needed
• make sure to bring up the “Details” screen for the shortcut (by touching the ⓘ icon) and activate the “Show on Apple Watch” switch

2] Edit the desired watch face, choose a complication slot, choose the Shortcuts app, and finally select the specific shortcut(s) you created in step 1.

Helpfullest two notes here:

• if you’ve got a favorite watch face, you can clone it and populate the clone with different complications, and
• you can configure your watch to swipe between watch faces.

That’s it! The earphone-handoff between iPhone and Watch still isn’t perfect, but it’s better.

Oh: and I installed additional actions for the Shortcuts app. I’m quite psyched to try out some of these 121 (!) new actions.

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1. 90% of the times I tell my Apple Watch to play music or a podcast to my earphones, the sound comes out of my iPhone’s speaker instead.
   
   Which has me fascinated: which Apple designer decided we’d want to use the Watch to control the iPhone’s speaker?
   
   I have never, ever wanted to control the iPhone’s speaker from my Watch, and I’m hardpressed to imagine anyone ever asked for that. ↩︎