On March 9th the Spring Forward Event took place in San Francisco. Apple announced a new Macbook and revealed some more information about the Apple Watch. The “most personal device” will be preorderable starting April 10th and will finally be available in the stores on the 28th of the same month.
I’d like to talk about a single slide that Tim Cook showed during the presentation. The exact moment is at the minute 80.10 in the video:
Tim Cook was talking about the new Apple Watch companion app that shipped with iOS 8.2. Tim Cook said:
“This is the app where you see, browse and download apps.”
My reaction looked something like this:
YES. This is awesome and exactly what I was hoping for. Users will be able to check and download apps directly from the Apple Watch app. This feature prevents users from switching to the main App Store app and look for a specific category or use the already broken search engine to look for an Apple Watch app. Apple Watch owners are going to download more apps because they are just one tap away the store. New apps made specifically for the watch will be easier to discover.
Another positive point of this approach is that, as a developer, you don’t need to waste your 100 words keywords with generic terms like “apple watch”.
If an app contains a WatchKit extension, it will show up in both the App Store and the Apple Watch App Store. The app will be used to manage all the settings and apps too. There will be also how-to videos.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the icon can be different. The documentation says that the icon can be different from the containing app and you’ll upload it in iTunes Connect. You can’t submit WatchKit apps at this moment and it’s not clear when submissions will open yet.
Pretty cool stuff!