watchOS 3 Pitch

Matt Birchler writing on his site BirchTree on what Apple should focus on for watchOS 3:

As we move into the spring of 2016, we’re gearing up for an Apple event in a few weeks and the WWDC16 rumors are sure to start coming any day now. Surely Apple is working on the next version of watchOS that they’re prepping to launch this fall along with their iOS and OS X updates. Apple now has real life data on how people use their Watches and have more than enough think pieces to read about what the Watch does well and what they need to fix. I have to imagine there are some big changes coming to the Apple Watch this year, so I wanted to make my pitch for what 3 areas Apple should focus on to make the Apple Watch better for existing owners and entice those who have’t bought in yet.

Birchler suggests that Apple should focus on three main things for watchOS 3: Best health, better apps, and outstanding communication. He walks through each and describes how he think Apple should approach things. I particularly like his pitch that Apple should let third-party developers make watch faces:

I can imagine a ton of other app makers who’s users could benefit from a highly focused watch face. MyFitnessPal could make a watch face that lets people log and view their daily stats. Snapchat could show you your recent snaps, Facebook could show you all your perpetually unread notifications, Dark Sky could show you a custom face based on the weather, Fantastical could show your upcoming schedule, and so on. There are a million possibilities and while many of these would be of no interest to you, there almost certainly is one of two that you could think of that would make sense for how you use the Apple Watch.

I’ve been saying this as well. Why should a watch face be only limited to displaying the time? In fact, to me, the biggest opportunity for Apple Watch to grow is to allow developers to truly have full control over what yo used when you raise your wrist. It’s almost wasteful that the Apple Watch’s default face is nearly 80 percent occupied by a clock.

I highly suggest you go read this piece. It perhaps is the best and most realistic article I’ve read on what Apple should do next.