Your Pixel Watch 5 double pinch does one thing per context, and until recently you had no say in what that thing was. An alarm goes off, you double pinch, it snoozes — even if what you wanted was to kill it. On the Pixel Watch 5 that is now a setting you control, along with what the gesture does during music playback and on the watch face. Here is where the option lives and which behaviours are worth changing.
Why this setting matters more than it sounds
The double pinch is the one Pixel Watch input you can use with a hand that is full, wet or gloved. That makes it the gesture you reach for in exactly the moments when pulling up a menu is not an option — mid-run, carrying shopping, half asleep at 6 AM. If its default action is wrong for how you actually use the watch, the gesture is not just unhelpful, it is a step backwards, because you still have to touch the screen afterwards to undo what it did.
On the Pixel Watch 4, the alarm behaviour is fixed: double pinch snoozes, full stop. The Pixel Watch 5 adds dismiss as an alternative, which is the single change most people will want.
How to customise the double pinch on Pixel Watch 5
- Open Settings on the watch itself.
- Tap Gestures.
- Tap Hand gestures.
- Scroll down to Customize actions and tap it.
- Pick a category and choose the behaviour you want. Each one is a simple either/or.
What each option actually does
- Media controls — Play/pause, or Skip. Skip is the interesting one: pausing is easy enough to do by other means, but skipping a track without looking at the watch is genuinely useful on a run or a commute.
- Alarm — Snooze, or Dismiss. Choose based on honesty about your own mornings. If you never actually want the extra nine minutes, set it to Dismiss and stop double-pinching your way into a second alarm.
- Watch face — Open ongoing notification, or Always scroll notification tray. The second option turns the pinch into a way to page through everything waiting for you rather than jumping into one specific thing.
One more setting worth changing while you are in there
Separate from gestures, you can long-press the media controls in At a Glance to switch between showing just an icon and showing “Icon and text”. The text version puts the current song title on screen, which is handy — but the font size is large enough that it can swallow a chunk of your watch face. On a minimalist face it looks deliberate; on a busy one it just gets in the way. Try both before deciding.
Caveats before you go looking
This is a Pixel Watch 5 feature. If you are on a Pixel Watch 4, you will find the hand gestures menu but not this level of control over what each gesture does.
Also, do not expect to find wrist-turn options here yet. The wording of the settings description hints that Google may extend customisation to other gestures, but as of publication the only gesture you can reconfigure is the double pinch. If the menu on your watch looks thinner than what is described above, check that the watch has installed its latest update before assuming the feature is missing.
Source: 9to5Google
