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John Gruber On Third-party Apple Watch Apps: They Suck and Are Really Slow
An anonymous reader writes During this week's episode of John Gruber's podcast, The Talk Show, Gruber sat down with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal to talk all things Apple Watch. About two hours and 9 minutes into the podcast, both Gruber and Stern began lamenting the poor performance they saw with third-party Apple Watch apps. 'It makes me question whether there should be third party apps for it at all yet,' Gruber noted. The pair also took umbrage with what they perceived to be a poor design choice for the Apple Watch app screen, with both noting that the app icons were far too small to be practical.
That makes no sense. They don't achieve anything if their apps look better than the other apps on the device, they just make the entire experience worse. It would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Smart watches ARE a good idea, they just need to have better characteristics then they have now. They need a much longer battery life, a LOT cheaper and they must universally work with any device, not just proprietary ones. There is nothing wrong with the idea of a programmable display on your wrist, but so far the implementations suck.
Good-bye
The problem is that the developers haven't had a chance to work on the actual device yet except for a limited number of cases. They have been developing on a simulator trying to guess how it's going to feel and respond on the actual watch. Once they get their hands on the watch then you will see the apps will improve.
Having said that I don't have plans to make apps for the watch or even to buy one. I just don't see what it gives me. Yes, for some people it will be handy but in my particular case I don't see the use.
You mean like the iPhone supported the vast majority of smartphone features when it was released, like native applications beyond what's bundled, MMS, video recording, 3G, Copy/Paste/Cut functionality, multitasking...
Oh, wait, that was a rushed piece of shit as well.
And yet people lined up to buy iPhones by the truckload, Google copied it's user interface and general device layout, the iPhone changed the mobile phone business forever and Nokia who dominated the mobile market went from having over 50% of the cellphone market to being a marginal player that got bought up by Microsoft. All things considered that is a pretty good track record for a rushed piece of shit.
Ohh FFS -- that was at the initial launch and not done as a fuck you but simply because they were more interested in just getting the new product and OS out the door. Initially, Apps were JS based and highly sandboxed. But they realized that Devs wanted something better and Apple set themselves to creating an entire Development Platform and App Store to support that. So any claims that Apple is somehow hostile to developers is utter BS. If anything, Apple stands to make millions off 3rd party Apple Watch Apps in regards to App Store and In-App Purchases.
Ohh FFS -- that was at the initial launch and not done as a fuck you but simply because they were more interested in just getting the new product and OS out the door.
It was definitely a "fuck you, this is a phone; this is not another fucking Newton".
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I wrote 7% of the kernel that runs on the things.
The Pebble is 1/3 the price, has a 1-week battery, and works with iOS, Android, and Sailfish. I will be interested to see how the Apple Watch actually does after release, since every smart watch review I've read for the past 2 years has measured against the hypothetical iWatch rather than the real competition.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
the iPhone only sucked marginally less (and they had apps, the iPhone didn't)
I don't think you actually remember what Windows Mobile 6 and BlackBerry 6 were like. Yes, the iPhone was the first mobile device that had a browser that wasn't painful to use, as you point out, but the user experience was RADICALLY different in many ways. Yes in 2007 when the iPhone launched, it wasn't unique in having a touch screen, but BlackBerries not only didn't have touch screens at all, they were controlled either with touchballs (that sounds weird) or scroll wheels(!). Most Windows Mobile phones were near-impossible to use without a stylus. And it wasn't just the touch interface... remember "pinch to zoom" before the iPhone? No? That's because it wasn't there. How about visual voicemail? Screens that rotated aspect quickly and easily based on orientation? A smartphone that worked with an online music store that didn't blow goats? You get the idea.
The only thing Apple did aside the incremental technical improvement, was strike a deal for unlimited internet with a major carrier (which didn't last, btw), which got attention.
Not so much, amigo. In 2007, at least in the US, unlimited smartphone data plans were very common. This was for the simple reason that it was f*$%ing painful to use more than a couple hundred MB of data on a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone with a 2G connection - 3G was very new in the US then, and the original iPhone only had a 2G connection. When people started to actually USE mobile data because the iPhone's browsing experience made it not painful - and it kicked the ass of AT&T's 2G network as a result - that was when capped plans became the norm.
"95% of all Slashdot