About That Missing Pinterest App...

Recently, we pointed out that the Pinterest app for Apple Watch was strangely AWOL, especially considering its September 2014 reveal. While we weren’t (and aren’t) sure what’s taking so long, company co-founder Evan Sharp explains to TechCrunch that, frankly, Apple Watch isn’t that big a deal for Pinterest’s business model right now.

TechCrunch: Where does the Apple Watch fit in to all of this?

Sharp: I haven’t used the [Apple Watch]; I just ordered one. I don’t think the watch will be as transformative as the phone is for Pinterest — but, I could be wrong. It’s just an extension of what you do with the phone in a more natural way. …

TechCrunch: How is Pinterest thinking about the new touch points on a device like the Watch, like force touch?

Sharp: I think… We’re not anxiously awaiting the next thing. I’d love to have a skunkworks team thinking about the next device. The reason we’re not all over it is it takes a while for it to reach any scale, and that’s important to our business. There’ll be a natural point, say force touch comes out for the iPhone 7, that were thinking about the model on iOS. With iOS releases we rebuild our app, and I assume we’ll do that with the next one. It may or may not take advantage of those new inputs.

Obviously, Pinterest as a brand is not all that convinced that Apple Watch represents some kind of immediate groundswell in mobile tech, and they’re happy to take their time to let the platform mature. I don’t disagree with the tactic, as I’ve personally found Watch apps from big names like Instagram and Twitter to be completely useless in their current configurations.

It’s also worth noting that, by Sharp’s own words, iPhone is where it’s at, and it’s where he — like me — expects it to firmly remain for the foreseeable future. Even when it comes to a native Apple Watch innovation like Force Touch, Sharp only cares about that in the context of iOS, which hasn’t even been announced yet. That’s pretty telling.

Still, that’s not really a knock on Apple Watch itself. It simply means that some apps and social networks, by their very natures, aren’t particularly well-suited to the wearable experience as it exists today. Pinterest is in no hurry to put out a terrible app, and there are lots of other big brands that should probably follow their lead.