German iOS Developer Shares Secret To Great Apple Watch Apps
Till Schadde, founder and CEO of award-winning German developer equinux, has some early, basic guidelines for developing for Apple Watch, and they’re as simple as can be:
- Get rid of all that content
- One-tap interaction models
- Design for busy moments
- One task, one app icon
- Make it snappy
Ever since Apple Watch was announced last year, there have been a number of articles positing on all the specific developer challenges that come with designing for the wearable. This is the most straightforward of those, and it’s particularly useful in that it’s not written with the technicalities of WatchKit in mind; it is accessible for non-developers. In fact, I’d argue that this is less of a rubric for coders and more of a plea for potential customers to be discerning about what they expect — and should demand — from their Apple Watch experience. These are the points that users should consider when gauging the actual potential of the apps they’re thinking of purchasing.
Point number four above (“One task, one app icon”) illustrates this most aptly. Its full text description reads:
Each icon on the watch home screen should encapsulate a specific task. Your [Apple Watch] app should represent a single task or utility. A good example is the way Apple has split iOS clock app into multiple Watch apps: instead of having one icon that comprises an alarm, timer, world clock and stopwatch, [Apple Watch] has dedicated icons for each of these features. That’s the type of focused featureset your watch app should aim for.
I can confirm from personal experience that cycling through those options on iPhone is a big pain in the rear, so I can only imagine that having to deal with such submenus on Apple Watch would be an even bigger pain in the wrist. In order to streamline your mobile life, apps on Apple Watch have to be as simple as the list above. Bear in mind, the guy who put this primer together makes a television programming app. These sorts of services are notoriously data-heavy, packing as much information as possible into the pixels available. (I’ve never not been totally overwhelmed by a TV guide.) Schadde knows that 95 percent of what he does well on mobile has to be cut away for him to do well with wearables.
And that’s a really interesting, largely-unknown [Not if we can help it! –Ed.] aspect of Apple Watch: how existing developers will wrangle their heavyweight apps into lightweight, split-second, Glance-able packages that people will actually want to use.
Most of Apple Watch’s longterm success will come from the platform’s wholly new apps and concepts or things that never worked well on iPhone or iPad. But almost all of Apple Watch’s early success will be predicated on how existing developers can peel back the complexity of their wares to the absolute bare minimum.
If equinux can get a TV guide — of all things — to work even remotely well on your wrist, the sky really is the limit for Cupertino’s next big thing.