AppleInsider Staff
In preparation of the upcoming Apple Watch launch, Apple on Thursday announced a new software developers kit called WatchKit for creating apps tailored for the company's highly anticipated wearable device.
Announced on stage by Apple CEO Tim Cook, WatchKit will be made available to developers in November, in time for app creation and testing before Apple Watch hardware debuts early next year.
When Apple showed off Apple Watch at the iPhone 6 event in September, only a few first-party apps were demoed. With the forthcoming WatchKit SDK, the smartwatch should have a decent population of apps from which to choose at launch, important for content consumption devices.
Today brought no news on a public debut, but Apple is still shooting for early 2015.
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
3 Comments
I would hope WatchKit comes with a watch emulator for iPhones/iPads so you can test and develop for at least the common sensors.
Wow. Crickets on the iWatch event news compared to all the rest of the articles.
I'm thinking (been thinking since the pre-announcement event) this geegaw is capturing the imagination of the fashionistas (and the fitness crowd I imagine) more than the technorati....
And that's even as I've come to realize how much more advanced it really is than Android Wear. But no way I'm getting any of the current (and announced) gens of wearables, since more gadgets to buy, another thing to manage and charge and research and choose apps for... ...and take on and off and charge and shower and on and off and charge and... ....hardly cheap.
....while (coup de gras) not solving any real (and certainly not any critical) non-first-world needs for me....
Whatever, while it may turn a tidy profit in this first incarnation, guaranteed not to sell in anything like iPhone and iPad volumes because it's only functional for a subset of people who are already Apple customers, and we're not all gonna run out and get one.
Also a good thing Tim's a supply management guru, because it's gonna be SKU city with all the configs, so lots of inventory work to be done behind the scenes to keep stock and deliveries running smoothly (plus working with new kinds of retail partners for some of the models).
I suppose that with iteration, breakthroughs and the filling out of the ecosystem wearables will start to serve meaningful new functions in our digital lives and become ubiquitous (tho' I'm not sure a "watch" is the only or ultimate wearable form factor). Still, that year's not gonna be 2015, and the Apple Watch is not going to be the item that single-handedly keeps Apple on the gravity-defying growth path it's been on in recent years....
Meanwhile I suppose developers may be busy digging in and not writing gushy comments on rumor sites, so I may be the outlier in my take. And yeah, I hope they come up with insanely great things that will make me eat these pixels....
Ah the cult of marketshare. It doesn't matter. The watch will have a HUGE profit margin, especially with people likely buying multiple bands. They will probably make more profit off each watch than they do off each Macbook they sell. No need to sell a billion. They'll easily sell 10s of millions and I think we'll be surprised how much a share of their total profit it delivers.
Then there's the unanswered question of modularity. Will I be able to keep my gold watch and swap out an S1 for an S2? They MUST be planning a way to provide easy watch service because the device needs to be charged every night, and batteries are only good for a few hundred charges before needing replacement.
The wrist makes a lot of sense as a lasting home of the evolving personal computer. I think Ive was spot on when he said about the evolution of watches: "... it took centuries to find the wrist and then it didn't go anywhere else ...". Desktops are like grandfather clocks, Laptops are like wall/mantle-clocks, smartphones are like pocket watches, and the smartwatch is like a wristwatch. The Apple Watch will eat the iPhone by the early 2020s a the latest. Sooner if Apple can pursued mobile providers to accept the idea of a software-SIM, which they are vehemently resisting today. Software-SIM will be a bigger disruptor to the industry than the original iPhone was.