Why we decided to drop our Apple Watch app

2014 - Smartwatches were all the rage. From Samsung to Motorola, everyone was launching their own. You could reply to chats, read emails and even make phone calls. Some experts argued that soon, Smartwatches will take over everything and phones will be dead. We used to joke around that when this happens, zombies will be ruling the Earth and this is how apocalypse will hit us. Newton was already on Android Wear, but clearly we, the iOS team wasn’t convinced. We were unsure. Then Apple decided to build their own Watch and it became a non brainer; we had to be on  Watch.

Umesh and Deepak designed a breathtakingly beautiful, minimal and yet functional (signature Newton) watch app. I was asked to develop this. We put in a lot of effort into perfecting the radius of every rounded corner, every pixel of that little attachment icon and what not. We finally launched the app in May 2015 amid much fanfare (within Newton offices :P). It launched around the time Apple Watch had started shipping. Our app received rave reviews and some even described it as one of best watch apps available.

Fast forward to today - We made an update to Newton that effectively removed the Watch app — something built over 3 years with much love and effort is now killed, just like that. So, what happened?

For one, the world came to terms with the reality that Smartwatches aren’t going to replace their phones. They will at best complement the phones. Use cases of watches were to be mostly limited to fitness & activity tracking, quickly glancing through new content without taking out the phone. In hindsight, our initial opinion about Smart Watches was right.

When we initially developed the Watch app, it was just another screen for the main app on the phone. In watchOS 1, apps didn’t have their own database and syncing code. They just had mostly UI with light weight logic to display data. These apps had to rely on the main phone app to get the data to be shown. Also, any user action on these apps had to be communicated back to the main app. Basically, Watch apps were just another screen for the main app — to display stripped down UI — nothing more.

Sometime in 2016, Apple changed their mind and wanted Watch apps to behave more like standalone apps — they would have their own DB, syncing code, action code. Interaction between phone app and watch app was reduced to minimum. This made a lot of sense for activity tracker apps. But for an app like Newton, it’s like doing too much to achieve too little.

Our Watch app would have had to be re-written from scratch to support this and it would have been more time consuming than all previous versions put together, since the app in question would basically be another full fledged email app on another device. When we analysed the usage of our Watch app with the actual audience, we realized that our biggest use case was to view notifications for incoming emails and quickly read and perform actions on them. This would actually be possible even without a dedicated Watch App.

Come April, Apple will remove all iOS apps with Watch apps that are not standalone, so we were left with no choice but to drop ours. Users will no longer be able to ‘open’ emails from notifications, nor will they be able to make templated replies from the Watch. That’s the downside of course. But on the upside, everything else should work as was before.