The 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch show the device’s promise and pitfalls.
Nobody needs an Apple Watch, or any kind of smart watch, really; we
haven’t quite figured out what to do with these things yet, beyond
activity tracking and replicating the alerts you already get on your
smartphone. But that isn’t stopping app makers from trying to figure out
more things to do with wrist-worn gadgets. There are more than 3,500
apps available for the Apple Watch, which started selling this month
from Apple’s website (though if you order now, you probably won’t get
one until June).
Lately I’ve been getting to know the Apple Watch that I have to
review by playing around with a handful of these apps. I’m trying to
determine which may make the Apple Watch truly useful and which could
just make it irritating.
So far, I’ve found that the apps that make the most sense tend to be
those that take advantage of the watch’s proximity to your body, don’t
require much time and attention, and don’t crowd its tiny display with
unnecessary information. Apps that are more annoying than awesome try to
cram in too many features, share content that isn’t really suited to
being viewed on your wrist, or simply don’t give you enough information.
Apps That Make Sense
Apple Pay: I never understood why I’d want to pay
for things with my smartphone, since it still requires pulling something
out of my pocket and it’s really not hard to swipe a credit card. But
paying with the gadget that’s already on my wrist? Sure, I can imagine
that being useful, and Apple Pay on the Apple Watch is smartly done.
The idea behind it is pretty simple: to pay for things in stores that
accept Apple Pay, you double-click the oblong button on the side of the
Apple Watch, which you hold up to the store’s credit card reader.
Sure, you have to first approve your credit card for use through the
Apple Watch app on your iPhone. And you have to be shopping at a
store that accepts Apple Pay (such as Walgreens, Sephora, or Whole Foods).
On
the Apple Watch, apps such as Twitter, Amazon, and Instagram don’t
quite work, but Apple Pay, Clear, and Yelp are easy to use.
You also have to be good at following directions—the first time I
tried to use it, at a Walgreens near my office, I didn’t realize I had
to press the physical button. Instead I fruitlessly double-tapped the
display, over and over, until I somehow deleted my credit card
information from the watch. Oops.
The second time, though, I got it right, buying coffees and snacks at
a Panera Bread. Not only could I avoid taking out a credit card, but I
was able to leave my bulky wallet back at the office.
Yelp: The review service works well on the Apple
Watch because it’s simple on the surface but contains a lot of
information down below that you can get to if you need it.
Opening it up, you’ll see icons for restaurants, bars, coffee shops,
and places that are popular and new. Tap on one of the icons and you get
a list of 10 places along with vital stats for each (its distance from
your location, price range, star rating, cuisine). If one of the
places—a nearby bar, for instance—is closed at the moment, you’ll also
see how long it will be until it opens today.
Tap on a result and you’ll get more precise information, like the
exact location, hours, and some review highlights. You can tap a tiny
map to get turn-by-turn directions, and if you want even more
information you can tap on a review and read it on the watch’s screen.
Yes, there’s a lot here, but it’s cleverly hidden; you can get a lot out
of the app with just two taps and a turn of the watch’s so-called
digital crown.
Clear: I make lots of lists, especially of the to-do
and grocery varieties. For a while, I used a pretty, simple iPhone app
called Clear, but the awkwardness of trying to maneuver a shopping cart
while swiping my smartphone screen to delete items from the list made me
switch back to handwritten lists I could crumple in my hand.
No more, thanks to Clear for the Apple Watch, which I quickly became
enamored of during a trip to my local Safeway. It made it easy to see
what I had to buy for dinner that night and then quickly tick it off my
list.
The Clear app for the watch is pretty simple. Assuming you already
have the app on your iPhone, you’ll see all the lists you’ve made, and
while you can’t make new lists (a good limit, I think), you can add new
items to any list by pressing a finger firmly on the name of the list,
or any item within the list, and then dictating what you want.
You mark tasks as completed by tapping a little circle next to each
item, and once they’re all completed the list will disappear from the
Apple Watch. It will still exist on the iPhone, with a strike through
each item, which is useful for things like recurring grocery lists.
Apps That Miss the Mark
Amazon: The Amazon app for the Apple Watch makes
sense in theory. I’m a big comparison shopper, and I frequently pull out
my smartphone in stores to see prices on Amazon. Simply talking to the
Apple Watch to search for, say, a bottle of blue Essie nail polish and
then buying it with a click on its tiny product page, all on my wrist,
sounded like something that could be useful at times.
In reality, though, the Apple Watch isn’t yet good enough at
understanding the strange words and brand names that often identify
specific products. I’m not sure if it’s a voice recognition issue, a
microphone issue, or both, but when I asked the Amazon app to find
things like “Mr. Beams closet light” or “Essie nail polish ‘In the
Cab-Ana,’” I ended up nearly shouting at my wrist in the corner of
Walgreens, repeating these product names like strange incantations.
The few times it did understand me—like when I searched for “Stanley
16-foot tape measure”—the app showed me five different products in its
search results, each accompanied by some basic information. Tapping a
result yielded the full item name, its Amazon rating, and buttons to buy
it or save it to a wish list with a tap (I had previously set up
one-click ordering on my iPhone). But with so little information in the
description, I was afraid of getting the wrong one, so I turned to my
laptop to actually make the purchase.
Instagram: Instagram images often seem too small on
my iPhone’s screen, so looking at the nine latest updates to my
Instagram feed on a much smaller display strapped to my wrist was even
less appealing.
In that sense, then, the Instagram app for the Apple Watch didn’t disappoint: it was about as annoying as I thought it would be.
It looks simple enough on the surface, presenting you with icons to
see the feed of your friends’ photos, or likes and comments people have
made on yours.
Images looked crisp on the Apple Watch’s display, but so minuscule I
couldn’t always figure out what was going on at a glance. If you tap on a
picture, you can see the caption and any likes and comments. Further
tapping is required to see who liked the photo and who said what, and to
reply to a photo by choosing from a series of 12 emoji (smiley faces,
various hand gestures, and, thankfully, the smiling poop).
It’s possible to see user profiles in the app, but they’re painful to
look at: just a tiny, circular profile photo atop a square containing
that user’s four most recent photos. Yep—they’re even smaller than what
you see in the app’s photo feed.
Twitter: Twitter is meant for short interactions, so
it seems like a natural fit for the Apple Watch’s small display.
Unfortunately, its first iteration doesn’t show quite enough information
to make it useful.
Some interactions are easy: you can retweet and mark favorite tweets
with just a tap, and respond (by dictating to the watch or adding an
emoji).
But the Apple Watch version of the Twitter timeline only shows you
the five most recent tweets from people you follow. If you want to see
more, you have to scroll down and tap “More,” over and over, until you
are sated. And while you’ll get a notification when you’re mentioned on
Twitter, there’s no way to view that activity by just looking in the
app.
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