[drzaiusapelord]

>Can I build a watch face? No

Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality.

>Can I access the users Heart Rate? No.

This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now.

This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but still feature rich and developer friendly.

[BinaryIdiot]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; I couldn't agree more. Not being able to build a watch face is incredible. Android Wear and Pebble both had this ability really quickly (Android Wear was at launch, I believe Pebble added it shortly thereafter) and much of this was done years ago.

But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.

[deong]

Android Wear didn't have it at launch either. It took six months or so to release an official watch face SDK. People did immediately hack watch faces together by making an app whose UI was a custom drawn watch face animation, but that was a little clunky in that you had to have an app on your phone for the face, and some of them were pretty rough on the watch battery.

But yes, overall I agree. It's a bit surprising just how locked down it is. Especially when it's hard to see the gain from it. The Apple Watch seems to have a shorter (or at least not longer) battery life than most of the Android Wear models that allow taxing the watch battery to do quite a lot more stuff.

[jsz0]

> This product seems rushed

Apple is almost always conservative with the feature set of software shipping on first-generation devices. Maybe they learned an important lesson in the 1990s about the dangers of not building on a solid foundation.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Battery life, legal reasons.

In time, Apple may change this and allow them. But with exposed functionality, start with a minimum viable product. What you add you can't easily remove.

[drzaiusapelord]

My Moto 360 lasts all day and has all this functionality and neither Google or Motorola has been sued by anyone. Its weird how people will excuse Apple with made-up assumptions instead of the time-tested "rushed product" conclusion that is more often true than not in the tech industry.

[cgy1]

Your Moto 360 is substantially larger than even the bigger Apple Watch. As such, it probably has a proportionally larger battery.

[drzaiusapelord]

It larger as it in has a larger screen which draws much more power. Not sure where you are going with this. There are AW watches that are smaller and last all day also, and then some. LG G watch, Zenwatch, Gear, etc.

[cgy1]

A bigger battery generally more than offsets a bigger display (see the iPhone 6+ getting better battery life than the iPhone 6 even with a larger display). All of the watches you list are still larger than the largest Apple Watch.

[melvinmt]

> This product seems rushed.

In Apple's eyes, it's Android and Pebble who are rushing :)