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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

The watch isn't meant to compete with your phone for content consumption, it's for subtle notifications and alerts. Who is calling me? What meeting am I going to in 10 minutes? Who just texted me? I see myself getting a completely silent alert and then discretely glancing at my wrist during a meal or some other time it would be inappropriate to be fiddling with my phone. I can politely excuse myself if it's important.

I don't expect to watch a movie on it, I just want it to look stylish and help me stay connected in a less douchey way. The fact that it may replace my Polar heart strap and watch when I'm working out (Hopefully it's more reliable than the Basis watch) is just icing on the cake.

I have a feeling there will be some interesting third party applications, off the top of my head it might be nice to know when my boss is nearby, perhaps based on strength of his phone's bluetooth signal.

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But I think that's kind of the point isn't it? Out of the box, the watch will more or less do all the thing anybody really wants it to do. It's going to be very hard to build a large viable app ecosystem for these things. At best I think Smartwatch apps will just be secondary notification displays for apps you're already buying and putting on your phone.

    At best I think Smartwatch apps will
    just be secondary notification displays
    for apps you're already buying and
    putting on your phone.

My expectation is that the only way an app will get on your Apple Watch is if it comes bundled inside of an app you have installed on your iPhone, a la iOS 8 extensions.

Which is how Android Wear apps work.

But this is not the kind of story presented at the keynote. What they presented was intensive interaction with apps: dragging, panning, zooming, etc.

I think any usable watch app is going to have to be pretty simple and lightweight on the interactivity side.

I think you may be responding to a different point than the one I was making. I was speaking only to the deployment mechanism for Apple Watch apps.

Isn't that how it is though? Anyone expecting anything more is going to be sorely disappointed.

I don't recall Apple pitching this as something you watch to play around with for a couple of hours at an airport with.

> I don't recall Apple pitching this as something you watch to play around with for a couple of hours at an airport with.

You're right, they didn't. But I'm hard pressed to figure out a great deal of apps for the watch other than what's pretty much going to be shipping with it. reddit mail notification? point to my car?

I dunno. It seems like there's a very limited ecosystem (read:business) to spending lots of effort making Apple Watch apps for exactly the reason you're stating.

Someone should tell EA about this. They already claimed to be working on bringing game apps to the watch...

The first thing I thought was, other than tic tac toe, what game could you possibly display on a display that small?

I also think, a watch like that is good first and foremost as a quick check on what going on regarding your phone in our pocket.

But for this usecase, I think the price point of this watch is a bit much. I would love to have my watch buzz when getting a new text on my phone. And with a quick glance I can see if it is important or not without having to take my phone out of my pocket. This would be neat. But I don't think I would spend 350 dollars for this convenience.

The one I always think about is maps on my wrist. Ever since I saw the promotional photo of a guy on a bike with a Moto360 & maps, it pops into my head as I am biking and my phone is hollering directions from inside my pocket.

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