Tim Cook: Apple Watch Has More Developer Interest at Start than iPhone or iPad

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that developers are showing more interest in creating apps for the Apple Watch than they did with the both the iPhone and the iPad this early on.

Developers are working on more than 3,500 apps for the gadgets, he said. That’s well ahead of the 500 apps available for the 2008 edition of the iPhone and the 1,000 for the first iPad in 2010, he added.

While this is certainly good news for Apple, it’s not really all that surprising. Remember, the iOS SDK for iPhone hit in 2008, just a year after the iPhone was introduced. Mainstream interest in the iPhone was barely getting off the ground, so of course developer interest was going to reflect that.

The iPad came out less than two years after the original SDK (2010 to be exact), so while developer interest was certainly higher, it was still early, hence the 1,000 iPad apps versus the iPhone’s initial 500 apps.

Today we’re six years into iOS developement and both the iPhone and iPad have hundreds of thousands of available apps. Of course there should be higher interest in the Watch, especially since the Watch heavily relies on the iPhone. 3,500+ apps may actually be low compared to the amount of developers that are out there, though I can’t say for sure. Still, it’s great to see developer interest and you can expect that go grow as the Watch hits more people’s wrists.

I’ll also be interested to see if we see a major uptick now that developers have access to many things including complications and sensors. I suspect we will.