Slack Nixes its Standalone Apple Watch App

[SurferPup]

Twitter was wrong to remove their app from the Watch. It was literally a life saver when you were sat on the toilet and you’d forgotten your phone

Dude - tru dat. Just today whilst squatting, I was pressing Minnie Mouse to tell me the time and she went all silent on my @rse.

 

[Shirasaki]

Tried slack on Watch and felt no need to retain it.
The problem is, when Watch is becoming more independent, there is pretty much nothing else an independent watch can do besides tracking fitness and telling time. Now maybe we can add “make phone call”.

 

[walnuts]

Just echoing some sentiments here. I think there is sort of a reverse chicken and egg thing going here. The hardware and APIs make apps too slow and unreliable on Apple Watch, so people say full apps don’t make sense on the Apple Watch because they have poor functionality.

I strongly think that if the speed were increased, apps would be way more useful/make more sense, but by the time Apple makes the necessary improvements, will most developers have given up?

 

[Sandstorm]

I'm not at all surprised, I don't use any third party apps on my Series 1 Watch as they're so unreliable. More often than not they sit with an endlessly rotating loading indicator, and I give up after about 20 seconds before the app's loaded. The Watch is supposed to be about quick interactions, that's impossible with third party apps. I don't blame third party developers, since pretty much all apps are the same; slow and unreliable.

I can confirm almost exactly the same experience with my Series 2. 3rd party apps are so slow and unreliable, I stopped torturing myself (RunKeeper was a total disaster, crash every other time. Philips Hue takes forever, Shazam also takes so long to start the song is often gone already). Now my Apple Watch 2 is just for notifications and general built-in activity tracking.

I would honestly like to know - is Series 3 any better?

 

[jonnysods]

I've found most apple watch apps to not be that great. Basically I just have the weather network app and even that is slow and annoying.

 

[Juiceboy]

the only 3rd party apps i used are fitness related Strava, streaks, Nike and pokemon go. That last one is unreliable AF that it's frustrating that they even bothered with it.