11. March 2015 · Categories: Apple

The unique experience provided by the Apple Watch is an always present user interface, crammed in a very small space, which makes interacting difficult. Given that it will be difficult to actively choose between multiple apps, we will see proximity as a tool to select the expected app for us: shopping list at the grocery, car keys at the car, thermostat at given points in the house.

We will see new apps that only interact with specific physical locations. Tools will appear that will replace their controls with the watch and a Bluetooth connection. So instead of turning a knob you will touch your watch, tap on the function you want to modify, and turn the crown. It is essentially what location based glances are for, and they can be better than the physical interface since you can modify things also when a couple of meters away. But it also needs quick access to control the nearest thing, maybe as a complication on the watch face.

This is similar to what Ben Thompson is saying on the Watch adoptation: The watch will be a great interface to all the internet of things items that people are dreaming about, but it will also enable your environment to better track you. So a room could know who is inside, and set the temperature automatically based on their preferences.

Given the huge amount of data the watch will collect (or enable others to collect), it makes it critical that this data is protected, well separated between the different hats we wear during the week, and not shared without our active consent. It underlines why Apple is best placed to make this a success, and why it is so critically important for Apple to keep that trust that Apple will not sell data and will not make devices that can be hacked. Especially with Apple Pay and other authentication solutions a hack could bankrupt you. So Apple cannot tolerate that the NSA, never mind criminals, can hack into your watch storing your car keys, setting them on a collision course.

In addition I believe that the iPhone is critically important to bridge the adaptation gap, to provide in the iPhone a fallback that works reasonably well to bridge the time until enough people are owning one.