Coming Soon: Watch App Reviews

Watch App reviews are on the horizon!

It’s been a long time coming, but in addition to news and speculative/cultural commentary, one of the foundational aspects of WatchAware is app reviews — there’s just been very little (if anything) to review since launch.

But that’s slowly changing, and we’re looking forward to establishing a review platform and protocol for the best Watch Apps. For obvious reasons (both practical and philosophical), we won’t be bringing you the dregs of the App Store, only the cream of the crop.

To that end, we have plenty of ideas, but so do you, and that’s why we want everyone to be a part of the process. In addition to suggesting great apps you personally come across, we want to help developers to get the word out about their latest, greatest masterpieces. Additionally, when it comes to reviews, there’s always some disparity between scoring consistency and the personal opinions of who’s doing the reviews: An app’s practicality might be wholly different for someone in New York City compared against the use cases for the average resident of Podunk County. There needs to be some way to take that into account.

One solution is to get rid of numerical scores or stars or etc. Perhaps a “Buy” or “Dont Buy” is more apt. A dual-review, “point/counterpoint,” two-writer sort of situation is probably impractical, but I trust Abdel and myself (and others) to have an objective enough approach to see things from both sides of the user spectrum and to spend enough time with a given app to fully understand where it shines and where it doesn’t.

Tentatively, I envision a review format structured something like this:

• App description
• Short review of iPhone app and efficacy thereof
• In-depth review of companion Watch App, analysis of app’s utility and whether or not it enhances the iPhone/user experience
• Round-up of bulleted Pros and Cons
• TL;DR single sentence/paragraph description of the whole shebang
• Recommendation to buy or pass (or just stick with the iPhone version)

Peppered throughout will be whatever media is deemed necessary to show off the app in action, but only the best of the best will get the full video treatment. Expect mostly screenshots (and possibly a new animated feature called AppPlays, being developed over at AppAdvice). We also want to have a segmented article layout for these reviews, but that may have to wait for a site redesign.

Of course, the reviews can’t wait, so we’re going to get started on those in earnest.

For tips on apps you’d like to see reviewed — or you devs who’d like to possibly see your stuff highlighted on the site — shoot me an email, and we’ll definitely give your suggestions and work a fair shake.

Happy apping!