The first wearable gadget from Apple beams messages, Facebook updates and simplified apps to our wrists, eliminating the all-too-common need to take out our Apple devices to constantly check notifications. The Watch and the iPhone are intimately connected and should be considered as one system together. There are more than a dozen ways to interact with the Watch, from receiving glanceable notifications, to feeling ‘taptic’ feedback, to summoning Siri, according to WatchKit documentation for developers.
Is that phone call from a telemarketer not worthy your time or an emergency from a loved one? Apple Watch makes mundane notifications easy to dismiss while keeping you in the loop with important alerts. There will be loads of Apple Watch apps available on launch day (24 April) by the sounds of it, but they don’t really have their very own space. You’ll browse through, use and download all Watch apps from your iPhone rather than directly on the Watch itself. Meaning, you shouldn’t think about the Watch as a separate device but more of an iPhone companion.
We’ve known for a while that Watch apps don’t run entirely independently and are highly reliant on a connection to an iPhone. That’s another confirmation that your Apple Watch is not going to be much use if you take it too far away from your iPhone – at least not yet.
Some of the apps Tim Cook and other key Apple figures showed off during the Apple Watch event in March included Uber, WeChat, Instagram, Shazam and a home security monitor. Expect to see these plus a boatload of others, including plenty of dross, come the summer. Don’t expect anything too in-depth, though. Apple’s Vice President of Technology, Kevin Lynch, says most of the Watch’s applications are “really about brief interactions… many of these are just a few seconds long”, reinforcing that Watch is more of a companion device than your phone is.
The Apple Watch app
The Apple Watch app (installed with iOS 8.2 on iPhone 5 and newer) allows you to pair and sync your Watch with the iPhone and to customize some basic settings. When you open it, you’re greeted by an introductory screen, which prompts you to pair your Watch with your iPhone. Tapping ‘Start Pairing’ takes you to a screen where you can use the iPhone’s camera to pair the phone with an Apple Watch. You need to hold the Watch up to the camera and align its display with the viewfinder to pair the devices.
There’s also an option to pair manually, which takes you to a more traditional list of devices for you to identify your Apple Watch. To find out your Watch’s name, you tap on the ‘i’ icon on the Watch and then correspondingly select that name from the nearby devices listed in your iPhone’s Apple Watch app.
