Ask HN: Where are all the Apple Watch apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where are all the Apple Watch apps?

10 pointspersonlurking12 comments

I've done several searches and can't seem to locate a list of available apps.

After buying the Series 5, as a first-time AW user who also doesn't use activity/health apps, I've become very interested to find all the apps I can choose from. Aside from tech publications showing "our top 20" style lists, and a limited showing on the AW App Store itself, there seems to be no large lists nor, seemingly, a whole lot of interest in the growth of the AW app ecosystem.

Am I missing something or is there only so much that the AW can do, and thus few apps on offer?

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I think there are a couple reasons for this.

First, historically, Apple Watch development was difficult and very constrained. The framework had a lot of limitations and, on early watch models, third party apps were very slow compared to native apps (which themselves were not very speedy).[1]

This is changing now as the hardware gets better and Apple is opening up more powerful and easier APIs to third-party developers, but it will take a while for third party apps to catch up. And the situation is still not as good as it is on iOS.

The other reason is that there's a small number of app concepts that even make sense on the watch. The watch is very good at a few things: quick, glanceable interactions (like notifications) and fitness tracking. Apple suggests that apps should "support fast interactions and focus on the content that users care about most", and that "interactions with the Apple Watch are measured in seconds." [2]

A great deal of apps simply don't fit this category at all. Many existing iOS apps expose some basic watch functionality, but many won't, because it just doesn't make sense. Consider how willing you would be to hold your wrist up in front of you for 30+ seconds.

[1] https://marco.org/2018/02/26/watchkit-baby-apps [2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

>Consider how willing you would be to hold your wrist up in front of you for 30+ seconds.

I'm likely an outlier as I keep it in front of my face for 2-3 minutes at a time when playing games, but I admit that it's a limited use scope, and my raised arm is usually supported in some way.

After a week of inital usage, the more quick interactions I discover, the more I like the watch. But when that fades, I'll at least be left with the ability to read full Wikipedia articles and browse Reddit, thanks to 3rd party apps.

I've played with the new Watch frameworks a little. Aside from the most basic toy apps, the Apple Watch app frameworks really aren't ready or stable enough for prime time.

It will take another year or two, depending on how much effort Apple puts into improving the APIs.

The most recent episode of the Under The Radar podcast goes into this a bit: https://www.relay.fm/radar/174

Well, it may first be worth asking how many Apple Watches have been sold overall. I haven't found any good stats for that, but it seems like it's around 30 million, and sales may have slowed down since then.

Meanwhile the iPhone's sales are in the hundreds of millions, and more are sold per year than there are Apple Watches sold since launch.

So it's quite probable many developers don't see the need to make apps for the device. The market isn't large enough compared to other places they could be focusing their resources.

Outside of that, as people have said, Apple Watch development was difficult early on, there are fairly few concepts that make sense for apps on a watch compared to on a smartphone, and it's more challenging working within the constaints of a watch than a phone overall.

So it seems like more work for a more limited set of concepts on a device that may not have a market large enough to justify the effort.

I haven't been on iOS for years but I had a first gen watch, aside from glancing at my wrist when driving or doing something with my hands to see what a text message said, I couldn't see any practical use for the watch, which is why I ended up selling it after 5-6 months. I did use it a couple of times to take a call when I was doing garden work and didn't want to fish my dirt-covered hand into my pocket but obviously that was a subpar experience and not something you'd likely do often.

I love the idea of devices like this but if it's something that requires you to look at, and manipulate things on, the screen... I'd rather just use my phone. I imagine many people buy them purely as a "hey look at me, I gots me an Apple watch!" and some people might buy them so they can glance at their watch (pretending no one notices) to check incoming text messages in environments where it would be rude or not allowed to pop out their phone, but from my own experience I just can't see them being practical enough to really have enough interest to spur development aside from "here's the most important data from our app mirrored on your wrist!"

I think the main use case is activity tracking. If you already have an activity tracking watch and it breaks, hey an Apple Watch let’s you activity tracking and maybe vibrates during navigation so you don’t miss your turn. But I have never seen much use past that.

Currently rocking a garmin 735 for activity tracking / run gps. When it breaks maybe I will get an Apple Watch? Or maybe a newer garmin. Nothing else the Apple Watch does really interests me. Also my watch goes 7-10 days between charges.

I forgot about the map notification, that was somewhat useful the few times I had to drive somewhere new (unless on the interstate/highway as it would vibrate with 1-2 seconds of notice, at least back then on gen1).

Sometimes it's through reading comments on how others use the apps that I discover a new way to use it. I thought Maps was restricted to looking at a map and zooming in and out.

In my experience, 2 years with the Apple Watch, it is primarily used for notifications and fitness related activities. It does those very well, for everything else it’s easier just to take the phone out of my pocket.

I have an AW for a few years now and was somewhat following the Apps trend, to my best understanding it's not about HW limitations, ease of development or number of users but simply the lack of usability.

Companies pulled out of AW because they found out that there is no reason for a watch-app. The screen is too small, feedback is limited by nature etc.

> Companies pulled out of AW because they found out that there is no reason for a watch-app.

There just isn't enough screen real-estate for ads and it's hard/impossible to embed creepy analytics SDKs in Watch apps.

on the older AWs everything went through the phone, and AFAIK even today for most things you still need the an application on the phone to do the heavy lifting- so analytics still looks possible

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