Why do I keep seeing the message
“Loading Bubbles…”?
I am sorry to bore you with the details, but they are important for understanding the possible solutions.
Background
Newer watches these days have 1GB or even 1.5GB of RAM. But even in 2021 we can still buy Wear OS watches with only 0.5GB RAM (i.e. 512MB), which is barely enough for the operating system, let alone for other applications.
Even though Bubble Cloud is very RAM conscientious (only using about 38MB), if you use a RAM hungry watch face besides it (Facer watch faces for example are known to use as much as 300MB of the 512MB on the watch!!!), they together will not fit into the limited RAM space.
In a RAM constrained situation the operating system will “swap” things in and out constantly to accommodate all applications (a bit like a circus juggler). The message you often see is a sign of this, Bubble Cloud is being thrown out of operating RAM then loaded back when needed.
Possible solutions
- The easiest solution is to simply turn off the “Loading” message. It is possible under “More settings” → “Hide helpful hints”
Of course this does not fix the low memory problem, but you won’t see the warning.
- There is no way to force the operating system to keep one app in RAM, but you can improve the chance of Bubble Cloud staying in RAM if you enable Overlay mode. If you haven’t enabled this option, I recommend you do.
In overlay mode the app drawer engages even quicker and since we are using a special system option the Android System running on your watch is less likely to throw it out of RAM. Please read this webpage carefully on how to turn on Overlay mode without annoying system notifications:
Overlay optional / It’s never been easier to set up! - If you are using other background running apps, you can try to get rid of them. The less things your watch needs to do, the better chance it is going to be able to smoothly do them.
- Depending on which watch face you use, you could try to use a less memory hungry watch face. Facer, WatchMaker, Puji Black are known to be extremely memory wasting watch face systems (they use over 100-200MB of the system RAM). Built in or well optimized simpler watch faces are much better choices for watches with little RAM.
- A good alternative to RAM hungry watch faces is to use Bubble Cloud in watch face mode. This solves several problems at once. Not needing separate launcher and watch face app to be in RAM alone saves a lot of RAM, but Bubble Cloud is one of the most feature complete watch faces, thanks to careful optimizations it still has a surprisingly small memory footprint:
Contacts in Quick Panel See more examples of analog and digital watch face themes for Bubble Cloud
This is a little introduction to setting up good looking custom watch face themes.
Finally, I recommend reading Introduction to Watch Face mode
