watchOS 3 in context
Building more useful and engaging Apple Watch apps with watchOS 3
watchOS 3 in Context
How watchOS 3 turned Apple Watch into a faster, simpler platform—complications that launch apps, the new Dock, flatter navigation, and SceneKit and SpriteKit animation—and what brand marketers and app developers should build for it now.
Download the strategy guidePDFWhen Apple first introduced Apple Watch, its combination of features was effectively guesswork. Two years on, watchOS 3 is what Apple Watch software always should have been: an operating system built around speed, efficiency and glanceability, which rearranges the core of the user experience to feel more fluid and immediate.
For third-party developers, Apple has loosened the constraints on what an Apple Watch app can be. We looked at how complications and the new Dock put apps one tap from the watch face, how Apple’s new design and navigation guidance makes them useful within two seconds, and how SceneKit and SpriteKit finally bring fluid animation to the wrist. It follows our iOS 10 in context ebook, and picks up where Designing for Apple Watch, our whitepaper on the first version of the platform, left off.
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What’s next
Apple Watch has always been a platform brimming with promise but falling short on execution. For third-party developers and brand marketers, it’s introduced a possibility of instant and expedient interaction with users, passing along discrete pieces of information that populate the moments of their days. However, actual usage has demonstrated that watchOS apps have a steeper hill to climb than iOS apps, and even the best iOS app developers have found challenges building experiences that matter on Apple Watch.
Despite the opportunity to deliver value in the brief moments that populate users’ days, even the best developers have challenges building experiences that matter on Watch.
With watchOS 3, Apple seems to be recognizing its platform’s shortcomings and beginning to course-correct. Everything about the operating system is designed to be more fluid, more performant, and more usable than ever before, and third-party Watch app developers will benefit from the halo effect of these improvements. Users were slow to try Apple Watch apps before due to the performance constraints and connectivity issues that plagued watchOS 1 and 2—but now, many of those issues have been stripped away, and users might begin to give third-party developers’ watchOS apps a second glance.
While users might have been slow to try watchOS apps in earlier versions, these improvements might inspire them to give watchOS apps a second glance.
watchOS remains Apple’s youngest and most volatile platform, with dramatic changes in functionality and navigation paradigms coming nearly every year. But while developers might have been burned by some of these changes that invalidated their watchOS UX decisions, the investment in this platform is still a reasonable one given the opportunity. Apple Watch is the most popular wearable platform in the world, a fledgling industry with a form factor that has only just begun to mature. Where mobile was at the dawn of the App Store in 2008, so are wearables with watchOS 3 today—developers are only getting started.