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Your Apple Watch App Probably Sucks

Your Apple Watch App Probably Sucks

May 11, 2015

M.G. Siegler:

I also think because so many of us — developers included — are still figuring out how this device fits into daily life, there’s a lot of quick experimentation going on. And most of that seems to be taking iPhone ideas and porting them to the Watch. That’s the wrong call. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

The vast majority of Apple Watch apps take far too long to load right now. So long, in fact, that it would be far quicker to simply pull out your phone and load a far more robust version of your app. That’s clearly a big problem.

I actually predicted that apps would not be very good to start.

The truth is that it’s very hard to fully understand a new product category from a distance, especially when its not in your possession. You really have to live with it for quite some time and you have to try and think about people’s daily habits. Combine that with Apple opening up the full potential of its SDK to developers and allowing native apps to run solely on the Watch, and I think we’ll start seeing some really interesting applications.

People complained a lot when the original iPhone didn’t have a native SDK for the first year, but I actually think it was incredibly smart to wait that long back then. It gave developers time to think, sketch, iterate, reiterate, and polish. There’s wisdom in that.

Apple Watch will undoubtedly benefit from a similar approach, but it’s one that Apple will probably accelerate, given the much higher interest in the wearable as compared with 2007’s iPhone launch. Hopefully we’ll start seeing developers get access to the Watch’s full sensor array and the ability to make non-tethered apps sometime this summer.