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by snapetom 1893 days ago
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.