Apple Watch in context

Adapted from the introduction to Apple Watch in context, and from an interview conducted for it, a white paper I started writing at Punchkick in the spring of 2015, meant to launch alongside the watch on April 24. It was planned as a guide to designing, developing and marketing for Apple’s new platform, and was never finished as such: it grew instead into Punchkick’s strategy guide Designing for Apple Watch, published that May.

In 2010, Apple debuted the sixth-generation iPod nano just as the iPod’s dominant influence was beginning to wane. The new iPod nano lost many of its predecessor’s features—no more video camera, no video playback, no tactile buttons—and gained a 1.5-inch multi-touch display and tiny square form factor befitting its name. But accessory makers quickly latched onto one inconspicuous screen buried in an afterthought “Clock” app, which displayed the current time full-screen on an analog watch face. They began building a range of wrist straps to accommodate it, and suddenly the spotlight wasn’t on the iPod’s music capabilities, or even on its minute form factor. Customers were eagerly wearing the Apple device as a watch.

The iPod nano proved that people were itching to wear an Apple device as a watch.

Of course, the proverbial smartwatch dates back to the days of Dick Tracy, a communications hub compact enough to fit on the wearer’s wrist. Apple indulged this science-fiction fantasy slightly, and doubled down on the customizable watch faces in a software release months later. But eventually, the iPod nano’s design deviated from the watch-friendly square and development focus shifted to the company’s explosively popular iOS devices. For years, it might have seemed Apple had forgotten that its customers had wrists at all.

Behind the scenes, Apple’s designers and engineers were toiling away on what would become its next big platform. Not televisions or automobiles, as so many pundits projected, but a smartwatch. A smartwatch deeply integrated with the company’s most successful and accessible products, a smartwatch inspired by the design aesthetic of the world’s highest-end watchmakers, a smartwatch benefiting from the market learnings of Android Wear manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola. A smartwatch unlike anything Apple had ever done, and yet unmistakably Apple.

Apple Watch is the fulfillment of the iPod nano’s promise, and the logical progression of Apple’s product evolution. Just as the iPod and early iPhones served as companions to the Mac, shuttling media and settings from a centralized iTunes interface, so too does the Apple Watch piggyback on the successes of iOS and iPhone.

Just as the iPod served as a companion to the Mac, so too does the Apple Watch piggyback on the successes of the iPhone.

Only this time, Apple doesn’t face an uphill battle with iTunes adoption. The App Store has proven itself to be the mobile development nirvana of our decade, with millions of developers and billions of customers already heavily invested in its ecosystem. Existing work on iOS apps will automatically have a halo effect on Apple Watch, and customers’ understanding of iOS user-experience schemas and appreciation for iOS design practices will only accelerate their adoption and familiarity.

Just as the iPhone was originally considered underpowered and the iPad initially laughed off as a “big iPod,” technology reporters have expressed skepticism about Apple Watch. But the reality is that Apple Watch will prove to be the premier mobile development platform for the next decade, building on the unprecedented strides Apple made in the smartphone industry. Apple Watch validates the wearable category, and introduces a plethora of fresh ideas and innovations that will surely cross-pollinate into iOS and iPhone hardware.

Before the iPhone, “smartphone” didn’t mean anything. Years from now, after the Apple Watch has left its mark, we’ll all say the same about “smartwatch.”

If brands want to reach their customers today, they need mobile apps to do it. Native development on iOS offers unparalleled opportunities to engage with billions of customers. Similarly, Apple Watch will become the new platform that captures the imagination of the masses. Watch OS is exciting—a brand-new platform for development—and is sure to be adored by millions just in its first few months. Building on the halo effect of runaway iOS adoption, Apple Watch will prove itself as an enormous opportunity for marketers. The first to adopt WatchKit and Watch OS will be the first to succeed, and will benefit from the perception as innovators that comes from an early-bird spotlight of WatchKit apps on the App Store.

But how can brand marketers capitalize on Apple Watch, beyond its simple novelty? How can WatchKit and Watch OS help brands and developers better connect with their audiences, and make good on the immediacy that wearables have long promised? In order to make the most of Apple Watch, brands need to intimately and fully appreciate its value. They need to embrace its idiosyncrasies to profit from its unique approach.

Apple Watch is massive, and a long time coming. This is Apple Watch in context.

WatchKit, from a developer’s side

For the paper’s chapters on WatchKit, I interviewed Punchkick iOS developer Sean Samocki a few weeks before Apple Watch shipped. He hadn’t yet held one: like every developer outside Apple, he had only the simulator and WatchKit 1.0. His answers, lightly edited, are below.

What WatchKit is

WatchKit is the SDK and APIs that Apple provides for developers to create the initial batch of Watch apps. Right now, they’re extensions of the phone app, and there’s limited availability of what you can do with WatchKit. Watch apps need a companion app on the iPhone that actually serves some purpose. One of the key limitations is that you can’t have native apps yet, unless you’re Apple.

A lot of people are saying there won’t be many groundbreaking apps on day one because of these limitations. People are excited about WWDC this summer, because we might find out about native apps on the watch.

WatchKit apps are essentially the same thing as Notification Center widgets, with the exception of the UI. All of the UI—the storyboard, the assets, the images, basically the whole appearance layer—is preloaded on the watch. The logic still happens on the phone. People are working on custom animated apps, essentially generating GIFs on the phone and pushing them to the watch. But it’s been tricky without experimenting on the watch in person, versus the simulator.

How the watch talks to the phone

All of the instructions sent to the watch are via Bluetooth. iOS apps have a lot of security provisions; they’re sandboxed, meaning apps can’t look at other apps’ files. Apple introduced shared app groups last year, which allow one developer’s apps to access one another’s files in a shared directory, or databases in Core Data. Technically, the phone app and the watch app are two entirely different entities. They come bundled together from the App Store and seem like one app, but they’re actually two. So the two apps access the same directory and pull data from the same shared app group.

You can dynamically create images or assets on the phone and then ship them to the watch via Bluetooth, but the problem there is the inherent lag involved. If you create a complex animation and ship 100 images to the watch, it can be incredibly slow, and Apple has been stringent about what apps are allowed on the watch.

What changes in an existing app

Developers with iOS apps need to add a WatchKit target to their existing iPhone app, since right now WatchKit apps can’t live on their own. You’re creating the extension component that handles all the communication with the parent app, and then a separate component for the watch app itself. That’s essentially a presentation layer, an Xcode storyboard that handles all the UI, and it can use up to 20 megabytes of storage on the watch.

Where it goes next

I think that eventually, and this is a big if, there will be native apps for the watch all on their own in a watch app store. But this is Apple kind of dipping its toes into the water and seeing how people are going to use the watch. It’s kind of like the first iPhone, with web apps pinned to the home screen. Hopefully by WWDC Apple will have a better idea of how it wants to proceed with native apps. I think something it’s concerned about is battery life. The watch is supposed to last about a day, and developers with native apps would drastically impact battery performance.

What to build now

I think one of the biggest disappointments was the watch’s dependence on the iPhone. Some of the most exciting things about it are its truly native apps, the Workout app and Activity app and so on. With the limited amount of API access we have, it’s constraining how we can make an app that really makes a difference. A lot of people are building a new view just to say they have a watch app, and that’s not really the way to go about it.

Think critically about what your iOS app does, and what its most useful feature is. Optimize for short, quick interactions. You look at watches today to check the time, and you move on, and Watch apps should be designed around that attention span. The watch will become a great way to filter the information that’s coming into your phone, and keep users from checking their phones every second of every day.

One of the downsides of jumping on the bandwagon is that if you jump too quickly, your hands might be tied when the native apps come out.

Native apps were announced that June at WWDC, with watchOS 2, which shipped that September.