A widely circulated NYTimes article, citing lack of support from Facebook and Snapchat as primary examples, reports on the wait-and-see approach many big mobile app developers are taking to Apple Watch. During Gruber’s recent appearance on The Dalrymple Report, the pair are generally dismissive of the piece and make the argument that one shouldn’t to expect apps that work well in a phone form factor to work well on a watch. They then go on to praise Apple Watch’s notifications as a major use case. Presumably they appreciate notifications from third party apps, so I think it’s interesting to note that watchOS apps are the mechanism by which developers can provide custom notifications.

In Apple parlance these are called Long Look notifications. These long look notifications are essentially fully featured in terms of what they can present. Basically, if a watch app can render something, a notification can render it too. While they lack full interactivity, apps can provide custom action that are presented as buttons under the content. What’s interesting about these is that the iOS watch extension (or native app in watchOS 2) is running while the notification is onscreen. This means that the notification can perform things like network requests or async asset rendering. So a photo app can show a photo, or a scheduling app could fetch estimated travel time from a server. I’d argue that for most applications (especially anything push-centric like a messaging app), the notification portion of the watchOS app is the most important thing to focus on.