iOS

Leveraging Apple's Watchkit to Let Apple Watch Take Your iOS App to the Next Level

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

So its official, the Apple Watch will be available on April 24. Now the pressure is on mobile app publishers to decide if they are going to provide Apple Watch functionality and, if so, how deep to go.

Your users may actually make that decision for you. Most iOS phone owners will want the apps on their phones to have some kind of functionality with the Apple Watch once they purchase the device. It may be a make or break situation for publishers as watch purchasers could decide to abandon apps that don’t offer some type of interaction with the watch.

Phone models that should work with the Apple watch include iPhone 6/6+ and iPhone 5/5s/5c running iOS 8.2. or later. And for those individuals that are carrying older models prior to these, you may see a combination upgrade of phones and watch, although the cost may keep many of these older phone owners from doing so.

Ok, you’ve decided you are diving in to the Apple Watch – what next? You basically have three different ways to go.

WatchKit apps have two parts. 1) A WatchKit extension that runs on iPhone and 2) a set of user interface resources that are installed on Apple Watch. When your app is launched on Apple Watch, the WatchKit extension on iPhone runs in the background to update the user interface and respond to user interactions.

WatchKit provides three opportunities to extend your iPhone app to Apple Watch: 1) WatchKit for building apps, 2) Glances, and 3) Actionable Notifications.

- Actionable Notifications: Actionable notifications that are built and designed with WatchKit let users take action right from their wrists.

- WatchKit Apps: Your app on Apple Watch contains a full user interface. Users can launch, control, and interact with your app in ways unique to Apple Watch.

- Glances. You can provide users with timely read-only information that they care about with a glance providing a quick and lightweight view of your app.

To start getting your app ready for the Apple Watch you can download the latest release of Xcode 6, which includes iOS 8.2 SDK with WatchKit.

Read more: https://developer.apple.com/watchkit/