Your Apple Watch App Probably Sucks

Thought it was worth elaborating slightly on my tweets about Apple Watch app development — which itself was riffing off of Marco Arment’s post on the matter, which should be considered required reading for anyone thinking about building an Apple Watch app.

Here’s what it boils down to: despite Apple touting the thousands of apps already created for Apple Watch at launch, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of them are either bad, unreliable, completely non-performant, or some combination of those three things.

I’ve tried well over a hundred of them at this point. Maybe 5 percent are decent. And 1 percent are good. The odds are not in your favor.

And that’s not necessarily developers’ fault. As we all know, the SDK is severely limited at this point. The Apple Watch apps, for all intents and purposes, are really just iPhone widgets. So best to think of them that way, as Arment alludes to. At most, they should probably be very simple remote controls for your app.

I also think because so many of us — developers included — are still figuring out how this device fits into daily life, there’s a lot of quick experimentation going on. And most of that seems to be taking iPhone ideas and porting them to the Watch. That’s the wrong call. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

The vast majority of Apple Watch apps take far too long to load right now. So long, in fact, that it would be far quicker to simply pull out your phone and load a far more robust version of your app. That’s clearly a big problem.

If Apple Watch is going to be a successful platform, it will be because apps that don’t belong on the iPhone flourish. Different device. Different apps.