I love my AirPods. I am happy with the sound quality and I love the convenience and the cleverness of the design. Clearly, a tremendous amount of thought has been put into the many and varied AirPod use cases:

• Open the case near your iPhone and you are connected automatically.
• Pull an AirPod out of your ear and the music or video you are playing pauses.
• Drop the AirPods back in the case and they charge automatically.
• Double-tap to interact with Siri.

There are two use cases, however, that just didn’t work for me.

• Skip to the next song (something I do reasonably often)
• Adjust the volume (either due to a song being mixed loud, or my circumstances/environment changing)

In either case, the only way to address this via the AirPods is to summon Siri, and that experience is just too slow, especially when you compare to the speed of pressing a dedicated button to skip or adjust volume, as you do with wired EarPods.

The approach I’ve settled on is way quicker than via Siri, but with more friction than a hard-wired button. I added Apple’s Now Playing app to my Apple Watch dock. When I want to change the volume or skip a song, I press the side button on my Apple Watch (the button, not the Digital Crown) which brings up the dock. I bring up Now Playing, tap away, problem solved.

Here’s a link to Apple’s dock management support page.

This is an OK solution, but I’d really love one with less friction. One path would be for Apple to add buttons to the AirPod case, but that would require adding Bluetooth to the case itself, along with buttons, not a reasonable expectation.

Another path would be adding a skip to next song gesture to the AirPods (I’m fine managing volume via my Apple Watch). I’ve read that a lot of people find the Siri double-tap unreliable. I did at first, but now I find that if I point my finger straight up, then double-tap the rear of an AirPod, it works consistently (And I love this tweet).

And if Apple does go down the add gesture road, why not expose the gesture in Settings so I can tie the gesture to other things. Perhaps Apple could tie AirPods gestures to Workflow, let me pull up a workflow from my AirPods. That too crazytown?

All that said, let me go back to where I started. I love, love, love my AirPods. Great tech, clever design. Glad to have them.

UPDATE: Great suggestion from Eduardo Garza Santos: On your Apple Watch, add the “Music” complication to your favorite watch face. Tap the Music complication, then spin the Digital Crown to change volume, or tap the arrows to skip forward or backwards. About as frictionless a solution as exists, though this won’t help someone without an Apple Watch. Also, though the volume part of the Music complication will work with most (all?) apps, the skip arrows will only work for music, not for podcasts, or even Spotify. But it’s something.