Returning to home screen during activity

I've had set holding DOWN to Watch Face. Originally it was set to music

Long press on Back keeps the activity running and takes you to the home screen. 

Good old VivoActive 4 has that solved elegantly, swipe to right and you are back to home screen. Swipe left, back to activity. Fenix devs are will not using a full potential of the touchscreen.

Awesome, thanks. For some reason I thought the shortcut was to select the watch face, not to return to home. I've configured long press back to Watch Face and it now works as expected 

That is really missed feature from Vivoactive 4 and would be very useful on fenix 7. 

Also, swipe shortcut could be implemented on fenix 7, it works beautifully on Vivoactive 4. 

Completely agree with these comments about VA4 swipe actions, at least left back to the home screen and then right to the activity.  However, it is hard to see how the left swipe to the shortcut screen which was good on VA4 can be duplicated with buttons, noting that the basic premise of the F7 is that all actions should be able to be performed with the buttons as well as the screen...   

FYI, it's actually not inconsistant at all - it's based on whether or not you have the Lap Key turned on in the activity settings.

For activities where Lap Key is turned on, then you must use a hotkey (usually long-pressing the back/lap button) to return to the watchface; a short-press marks a new lap.

For activities where Lap Key is turned off, the back/lap button always returns to the watchface.

So it actually is quite consistent. Some activities have Lap Key enabled by default, others don't. Walking, for example, doesn't usually involve laps, so it's disabled by default. Running usually does involve laps, so it's enabled by default. You can change that settings on both those activities (and most others) if you want to. If you never want to use the Lap Key for any activity, and always want a short-press of the back/lap button to return to watchface, then simply turn off the Lap Key function on all of your activities.

It’s actually not necessary to set up a hot key. 
Long press on the back/lap key always takes you to the home screen, even though it’s an activity with lap enabled. 
to return to the activity just press the start/stop button. 

Scratchen said:

It’s actually not necessary to set up a hot key. 
Long press on the back/lap key always takes you to the home screen, even though it’s an activity with lap enabled. 
to return to the activity just press the start/stop button. 

Technically it's still a hotkey, but you're correct that it's a default hotkey so it's not necessary to set that up. However, one could actually change the behavior of long-pressing the back button if they were so inclined, to do something different than returning to the watchface.