The Apple Watch feels like a stalled platform
qz.com
qz.com
The author is not being lazy, he's being impatient.
I'll revisit this in another 4 years and 5 months and see where the platform is then.
On the watch side, I don't have an Apple Watch but I picked up a Moto 360 for around $150 last year. Not gonna get into the eternal Apple vs. The Rest debate but one things I've noticed (aside from agreeing with your thoughts on the adequacy of using it as a simple phone extension) is that my other most common activity is changing the face of the watch.
It seems like such a simple thing but honestly, if someone offered me a $150-250 watch that simply told me the time and mirrored notifications from my phone, I might not be too enthusiastic. But if the proposition was just $150-250 for a watch where you could change the face to look any way you want, I think I'd still be tempted even without much in the way of other "smart" features.
There's a huge range of watch faces I can download and there are simple tools that allow me to make my own. I can easily swap from something minimalist to something that looks like a luxury watch to something that looks like a Fallout Pipboy to something that looks like a neon sign with a couple of taps on my phone or watch.
It's something I didn't expect to care much about but the sheer flexibility of a programmable and customizable watch face has made it one of those head-slappingly obvious features I should've seen a mile away.
I wonder when/if the Apple Watch will give more options in this regard. Because no matter how cool the apps are, a watch is still a personal piece of jewelry as well. When that piece of jewelry is also a computer with a display, there's a lot of room for customization and personalization, even if they want to keep the core interface the same for consistency. A user-defined or even user-created default face for when your watch is just sitting on your arm would be great to have, even if tapping or interacting brought up the standard Apple Watch interface.
This year was an unusually crazy year for iOS developers. Apple released: - watchOS 1, with a slow and clunky experience - iOS 9, with adaptive multitasking - watchOS 2, requiring a rewrite of the watch app – tvOS, a whole new platform, with more easily translatable app experiences.
Additionally, with the "2-versions behind" strategy for Xcode, a lot of app developers (myself included) dropped iOS 7 support. This was actually one of the most complex transitions ever. (So many backwards incompatible changes (size classes, presentation controllers, push notifications).)
So something had to give. For me, and for many others, I'd say it was probably the watch.
No one needs to carry a watch, so the Apple Watch has a much smaller potential market to begin with. It really needed to succeed as fashion (since that's a major reason anyone wears a watch these days), and it simply hasn't. The original iPhone looked like the future. The Apple Watch looks like a slightly sleeker version of a Dick Tracy wrist radio.
The Apple Watch (or whatever wearable form it evolves into) will be truly successful only when it can replace the iPhone entirely.