Rethinking the Apple Watch platform manton.org
@manton Totally agree that Watch is not like other platforms. And Series 0 will stay “good enough” for many for longer than most Apple devices. I believe there is a future for 3rd-party watchOS apps, but not one that follows usual patterns.
@manton I keep thinking to myself, “The best watch apps are the ones I don’t have to launch.” My sleep tracker, as a perfect example. It’s the “passive” app experience that I’m looking for mostly.
@joec I like "passive" as a way to think about it. The watch isn't great as a screen that requires lots of tapping.
@manton I have been wearing an Watch since day one as well. I have always liked the device, but series 3 made me love it. Prior to series 3, apps didn't make sense because it took 5 min to complete what should be a 5 sec task. Series 3 get's things going in a 'reasonable' amount of time, still not as fast we would like, but ok. The cellular feature marks the first time in history I will leave the house without my phone 😱 (not all the time, but sometimes). Overall it feels to me like there is too much emphasis put on the watch being equal to the iPhone. It wont be for a long time (if ever), so both Apple and us users needs to still figure that out. Having only been around 1/10 as long and being 1/10 the size, the watch has massive constraints, but it's progressing. When the alternative device to the Watch is the iPhone X, it's always going to lose.
(I hope replies can be this long) 😀🤔
@Burk I also had the Series 0 and went to the Series 3. I would say it’s a revolutionary jump. As @manton described, Siri is one of the primary interfaces of the Apple Watch, and while it still has issues Siri is SOOO much better on the Series 3. I’m looong forward to the improvements over the next couple of years. I do think dropping support for Series 0 could be a huge boost for developers incentives to develop apps, but SiriKit support also needs improvement for the Apple Watch to really excel.
@apulianas Sleep Watch. As long as I wear my watch to bed, it does the tracking automatically. itunes.apple.com/us/app/sl...
@apulianas I’ve found it’s pretty good at guessing when I actually sleep. Sometimes I have to go in and edit the hours, which I’m glad I can. But most of the time it’s accurate enough.