The current experience with the Apple Watch is a good indication that watch apps can evolve into useful companions. The watch is a good device to display glancable information. Because it is so uncomfortable to hold your arm up for more than a few seconds, it works best for small interactions. It competes for your attention with the phone, which provides a much larger, and more comfortable screen. So the information presented on the watch only wins when: 1) you are using your arms for something else, and cannot easily hold a phone or 2) the information is glanced so fast that the extra 1–3 seconds to pull out your phone would be an issue. All of this means that you should be very selective in what you have on your watch, that you should concentrate on a few tasks that occupy you regularly and rigorously trim your apps down to the few you are actually using.
These are the tasks where the watch excels for me, ordered by functions:
- Siri is brilliant for adding timers, and keeping track of fleeting thoughts, like remembering you of thinks you happen to notice. In the home, Amazon’s Alexa is actually showing what could be done.
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Glances can be very nice to show you important information you are interested in. Unfortunately they update quite slowly, and this is a problem Apple needs to address. Especially the apps should have a way to cache the relevant information on the phone, so that the display updates very quickly. My most often used glance is the weather (to know when it rains), and I have trimmed the list now to 5 glances, all about weather, podcasts, and the calendar. 3 extra glances are there for pinging my iPhone, checking heartbeat and battery status, but remain mostly unused.
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Apps could be great if they optimize for the up to three most used functions. But they are currently way too slow. It often takes more than 10 seconds for the app to be ready, and this is so bad that I have essentially stopped using them. The builtin apps show that great things should be possible here.
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Notifications are probably the best feature of the watch now, allowing you to quickly decide what should be interrupting you, and to get updates while traveling. The best feature might be that they appear on a screen you are not constantly looking at: you see no interruption while you concentrate on something else, and you catch up on them while you find the time to glance at the time.
watchOS 3 looks like it will fix the issues with glances and apps, combining them into one experience with the dock, and most importantly removing most of the delays. I wonder about the decision to use a button instead of a swipe up to show the dock. Swipe up is lower friction than a button press, because your finger is then already in the right position to continue. And I cannot imagine anyone wanting to interact with control center often enough to justify giving it such prominent placing. Glances gave you very fast access to a few functions: swipe up, swipe left/right, press button on glance directly (only for built in apps, though). This is lost with the dock. While you can see up to date snapshots, they are significantly smaller than the full screen. I really would like to see the swipe up place reserved for showing an alternate watch screen.
I especially like the maps app on the watch. Because it provides directions using vibrations, I can follow them without me being distracted by having to look at a screen or others by hearing the voice prompts.
It is important to understand that the watch will always be a companion to the phone, specializing in making a few tasks better. It has a great niche in being an additional source of authentication, but otherwise every single task you do on the watch could also be done directly on the phone. It is a convenience shortcut, and for apps to thrive on the watch they must adopt this mindset.
There seem to be a lot of people calling for the watch to become a standalone communication device. I doubt that this will be the future: the watch would have to rely on voice as its input method, and it lacks a screen you can comfortably use for more than a few seconds to present you the answers.