What do I need to do to get my Apple Watch apps to launch quickly?

Question

Apple describes its Watch as being "ideal for quick looks and fast interactions", but most (in fact almost all) of third party Apple Watch app Dark Sky take 20-40 seconds to launch — during which time I could have removed my phone from my pocket and launched the corresponding iOS app.

Is there something I need to do to get this app to launch faster than I could launch it myself on my iPhone?

Answer 1

The biggest thing you can do is delete all the apps except the few you want to be “fast”. Then benchmark and only add others till your performance is acceptable. Be sure to power off your watch, then try launching apps a couple times to get the stable time and not first launch time.

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All third party apps on the Watch currently are going to be slower than grabbing the iPhone, unless you can't get at the phone due to social constraints or it being inaccessible in a bag or pocket or some distance from you and the watch.

This is because Apple has made every effort to let no code run on the watch at release. Third party apps get to run nothing on the watch. They don't get access to the digital crown, force touch, regular touch, sensor data or the speaker/microphone directly.

They only pre-load some potential answers and pictures (think flash cards and a small photo album) and all the work gets done on the iPhone OS. If you want an answer quickly, get your phone out and access the apps there directly. That saves the Watch from constructing a network connection to the phone, waking it up if needed, activating the app in the background and then telling the app what to do so that the phone app can then tell the watch what images / text to display. If those assets are not pre-loaded on the watch, you then have to wait for them to transfer.

The watch will be faster than the phone only when the phone can push events to the watch on its own behalf. For Dark Sky - perhaps you have a severe weather alert that the phone detects in the background or due to a push notification from the Dark Sky servers to the phone using APNS. Then the phone knows there is a watch and pushes a notification to it. You'll get that notification on the watch before you can pull out your phone.

Worse, most of the apps that are shipping are programmed only in the Xcode simulator and not by developers that have used the watch. A select few developers had the chance to tweak their app with pre-release watches and in the past few weeks with hardware, but most apps just can't be great yet.

It's like reading a book about how to learn to ride a bike and then playing with a bike riding simulator. Developers need to go out and ride their bikes and crash, skin their knees, crash some more before they know how to actually ride that new bike.

Here are some developer perspectives explaining this in more detail:

• Your Apple Watch app probably sucks
• Overcast Apple Watch app redesign

The two apple watch apps I was involved in were not shipped. After evaluating the risk of shipping a smiling 💩, we decided the benefit of being "First" wasn't worth the high chance of wasting our time and our user's time until we actually know if the app would be useful.