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by threeseed 4069 days ago
Every restriction that Apple made makes total sense for the short/medium term. Watch faces need to be impeccably programmed or are likely to dramatically reduce battery life (some of the existing ones use OpenGL). Developers shouldn't be redefining the behaviour of force touch or digital crown before users have had a chance to properly learn them and access to heart rate surely had FDA implications.

Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9 and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely open the platform up a bit more.

Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.

3 comments

Watch further establishes people into the Walled Garden which is Apple.

I still think people just don't wear watches will cause watches to be a very minimal form of wearables.

I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface and longer battery life and faster cpu :)

The current Watch will be outdated really, really fast. I don't think owning the current generation of Watch will make people buy an iPhone over an Android in 2016 or 2017.

In terms of lock-in strategies, iCloud Photo Library feels a lot more powerful to me. Can't wait to see if Apple can get their services fixed in the long term :)

> I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface

Then Will.i.am would like to sell you a smart cuff/bracelet thingy:

http://www.puls.com/

Sadly, despite being huge, it gets worse life than an Apple Watch, even if you don't use it as a cell phone.

People stopped wearing watches in the iPhone era. Perhaps in the Apple Watch era that will be reversed.
Walled Garden. I like the metaphors.
They will probably "unlock" all the features you want in the upcoming version so people will buy those to have things that should have been there from the beginning.
Why? Apple's never done that before.
Except with the iPhone, which couldn't run native apps when it was launched.
Yes, but weren't iPhone OS updates free? At least, I think only iPod touch owners were charged.
Keep in mind that all the Watch apps had to made exclusively on simulators until the watch itself was publicly available.

Once we had a watch we discovered tons of bugs that didn't show up before.

That's not true, some apps have been at least polished/tested on real watches before the release.
I'm trying to do something to help with that at www.watchtesters.com