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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.

6 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So? by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's worse than the apps on an Apple watch?

    A 2 hour podcast about the Apple watch.

  2. Re:So? by spire3661 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Good-bye
  3. Misinformed by avandesande · · Score: 5, Informative

    Currently the application are hosted remotely on the I-Phone. Apple has promised that the will release a native api in the near future. What they are seeing right now are NOT native apps.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  4. Re:Is it the Apps? by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:How convenient for Apple... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:How convenient for Apple... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Funny

    Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I stole 7% of the kernel that runs on the things from Mach and BSD.

    FTFY

    Given that I also wrote much of the init.c in FreeBSD, you probably failed to fix that for me. :p