Apps Series 3 LTE and Third Party WatchOS Apps

[ZebraDude]

I have been thinking about the upcoming Series 3 with LTE and I use over 100 Third Party Apps on my Watches and the majority of my apps sadly are not native so I have come to the conclusion that for me LTE has little value.

I love to hear other feelings on this.

Ps. It seems to be the classic Chicken or the egg issue. Developers do not see enough usage of their WatchOS apps to put the effort into making them native.

 

[CobraPA]

What are you calling a native app?

 

[ZebraDude]

What are you calling a native app?

An App that is able to run with the synced iPhone off or out of range.

 

[Marconelly]

You can have a native app on the watch that is still using phone's networking - but I agree, this is a very overlooked aspect of watch apps - I guess precisely because developers realized most people won't use the watch without the phone nearby anyway, and most watch apps relying on network access do need some form of communication with the phone at some point (like data entry or authentication). I think this will change once the LTE watch is finally released. I had my apps ready for this really since the watch series 2, which I already was expecting to support LTE. As a big bonus of making their networking independent from the phone, the reliability of the internet access has been far better then when relying on the phone.