There's No Big Idea In These Small Apps

With millions of units sold (out) in just a few days of availability, Apple Watch is already a rousing success. Better, there’s no real reason to believe it’s going to slow down, even as its eager fan base is beset by frustrating delays and a continuing lack of coordination out of Cupertino. But all this early success can be attributed more to hardware and hype than software and substance, because — if our current crop of big-name third-party apps are any indication — there’s little impetus otherwise to buy Apple Watch in the first place.

Indeed, I can’t recall a time when third-party developers have been as handicapped through a product rollout as they’ve been with Apple Watch, and it shows. Through (mostly) no fault of their own, the backbone of Apple Watch — the thing’s veritable vertebrae — is putting out uninspired and ill-considered concepts about what the future of wearables has in store for the world. And Apple’s actively encouraging it through a campaign of needless exclusivity and secrecy designed to keep app makers in the dark right up through the Apple Watch launch — whenever that is.

Sure, blockbuster companies have seen the inside of Apple’s testing facilities while two-man indie teams got invited to expensive one-day “workshops,” but every launch app’s been mostly predicated on a disjointed set of theory and expectation, built in simulators with no access to the real-world, long-term, persistent field testing even the simplest such programs require for finely-tuned refinement. Worse, WatchKit is so limited right now that 99 out of every 100 great ideas are physically impossible to pull off at the outset. So we end up with garbage like this. And this. And this. And so on. (Although I’d be remiss not to point out that the implications of that last example are hilarious, which means there’s at least some inherent worth there.)

However, in addition to Apple’s locked-down approach, the company’s design recommendations are perhaps even more to blame. Instead of getting test units into the hands of dedicated programmers and app makers, Apple’s been content to push the nonsensical idea that the “perfect” Apple Watch app will simply be some distilled iPhone offering, stripped and barren of every important feature save the most important one, which, for whatever reason, needs to be on your wrist.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that most apps can afford to be boiled down to their barest essentials, but the idea that Apple Watch exists to encourage this as the primary course of (inter)action is absurd. The notion is a lie, and it’s been fostered by Apple as the easy way out — for them. In many ways, it’s less strategy and more symptom of Apple Watch’s problematic development and production history. Third parties are afterthoughts because Apple couldn’t settle on the beforethoughts soon enough to appropriately switch focus pre-launch.

None of this is to say that there aren’t some fun, useful apps ready for April 24 (or whenever your Day One actually is — mine’s sometime in June), because there are. We’ve got a bunch of them showcased in our Apps section, and there are more coming in every day. But the key differentiator between inspired and insipid seems to be a paradoxical one of size and vision: The bigger and more established an app company or social network, the less forward-thinking their inaugural wearable offering. Here’s how Twitter describes its official app’s Apple Watch feature set:

Tweet, Retweet, reply and favorite in a flash. Quickly see recent Tweets and top trends. Share your location, a song, or your thoughts with a flick on the wrist. It’s Twitter, but littler.

Littler? No thanks. And remember, I’m a big proponent of the idea of filtering out notifications and distractions. I’ve no doubt that Twitter for Apple Watch will achieve that, but I do question the 1:1 translation of big app to small app when size is the main consideration. In other words, I question the seeming lack of platform-specific creativity on display here, and it’s more than a little disappointing.

But at least Twitter does have a case for a place on Apple Watch. Other big players, like Instagram, really might not, and they’re pressing along anyways. While I don’t blame them for doing so, I do wonder about the value proposition of a teeny, tiny browsable picture gallery on your wrist. Per the Financial Times, Facebook’s subsidiary approached Apple Watch with trepidation:

[W]ith Apple’s own Watch apps focusing on health tracking and sending messages, Instagram was initially unsure whether its service would be at home on the new device.

After convening a “war room” of engineers and designers, including input from its founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram began to try “a lot of sort of hacky things” to see what might work.

And they came up with the most hacky thing imaginable and went with it.

You know what Instagram for Apple Watch does? It lets you browse thumbnails (of presumably high-quality, detailed, artistic images the jists of which you’d never glean due to the wearable’s diminutive form factor) and leave emoji-based comment responses to them. I’m not saying there’s definitely no place for Instagram on Apple Watch, but this clearly isn’t it. And it’s worrisome that such a highly-regarded team of industry professionals couldn’t come up with something a little lot more unique for that all-important first impression. Still, as with Apple Watch itself, poor first impressions shouldn’t be such a big hurdle for brands like Twitter and Instagram to overcome.

Apple Watch is supposed to be simple, and perhaps the simplest thing about it is this: In the near term, many of the most recognizable and popular Apple Watch apps just won’t be that good. A lot of outfits are going to release boring or needless stuff for fear that they can’t afford not to, and while they’re probably correct, the end result — the overall quality of their product — will suffer the early shame of the underwhelming, whether or not they actually demonstrate any lasting use cases. I expect these teams to get Apple Watch right eventually, but it’s going to take a whole lot more access to the Apple Watch SDK and a whole lot less thinking inside the box before any of them do.