[diamondhandle]

I am guessing you mean the popularity of Apple Watch as a developer platform, which is totally correct. In fact, it might be the first platform where developers said “sorry Apple, we aren’t interested in making you more money.”

[hparadiz]

Most development around the apple watch caters to using the data somehow rather than actively running code on the watch. Even if all you're doing is number crunching you're ultimately creating demand for the device.

I don't typically see many good use cases for running your own apps on the watch but there's many medical/fitness applications for the data itself.

[f6v]

Developers always want to “build relationships with Apple” by implementing the silliest ports of their existing apps for new devices: Apple Watch, Apple TV.

[Ensorceled]

I think the developers actually said "people keep either not installing or uninstalling watch apps that don't make sense to be on a watch so there is no point"

My watch only has a few apps outside of fitness and alerting, everything else gets deleted. I found Audible and podcasting apps useful.

[snapetom]

Speaking as a Day 1 Apple Watch owner, not as a watchOS developer.

I think the first generation of Apple Watches were woefully underpowered for what they pitched as a development platform. The resources were very limited. Developers had to nail optimizations, and that was a shock in today's world where too many developers just npm install or pip3 install their problems away. It's very telling that early on, despite having a ton of apps, the fastest, most stable ones were the included ones by Apple and Google Maps.

The result were a ton of slow, crashy apps with poor connection reliability. Users, myself included, got pissed, blamed the apps, and developers just said this wasn't worth it.