In an interview with the Chinese language edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, Tim Cook noted that developers are showing more interest in the Apple Watch than they had in the iPhone and iPad at a similar early stage.
Developers are working on more than 3,500 apps for the gadgets, he said. That’s well ahead of the 500 apps available for the 2008 edition of the iPhone and the 1,000 for the first iPad in 2010, he added.
Cook also confirmed what most had assumed: the gold color introduced for the iPhone, iPad and now MacBook (and presumably real gold for the Watch) was “in part” driven by the popularity of the color in China. Greater China now accounts for a whopping 29% of Apple’s revenue …
Cook also noted that Apple is supporting a tech education program in Chinese schools. More than 180 schools have trialled a program which covers everything from composing music in GarageBand to teaching hearing-impaired children to use smartphones. Apple hopes to expand the program by 50% by the end of the year.
IDC recently predicted that total wearable sales – covering everything from basic fitness bands up – would hit 72M units this year, noting that smartwatches are closing the gap on entry-level devices.
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A watch is not a phone Tim.
You probably were one that said “A PDA is not a phone”
Of course the watch attracts more devs. When third party apps were first announced, nobody knew, how it would turn out. With the watch it’s something else – every dev can be sure that there will be enough customers.
Kudos to Tim for choosing his stats to cite carefully.
Hasn’t AppleWatch already been declared a failure by all the pundits. They’ve all claimed it’s a device that no one needs.
And that’s still true. No one needs it but everyone wants it.
The sales don’t reflect the usability of the product, more like the ability of Apple to market and sell that thing.
No one NEEDS a Bentley, a Pinto will get there. No one NEEDS a Rolex as a Timex tells time. No one NEEDS caviar as tuna will sustain you. We don’t NEED A great many products that are hugely successful.
nice try but interesting would be how much out of 3500 are “killer” apps or at least “useful” – 500?
;-)
Same percentage as iPhone apps, probably …
sure – I think numbers can be “read” this way or that way ;-) cause of “easily ” added “extensions” to already existing apps there is a higher number of “Watch(ready) apps” than when the app store was new and quite empty (or apps have to build from point zero). anyhow. to highlight those high numbers of “watch apps” sounds to me that apple is not happy with sold watches (number of units) and so instead talk about those “apps” (Lorem ipsum:)
Never mind the apps – Apple NEED to allow developers to create personalised watch faces. The best thing about Android Wear is you can truly personalise your watch by using or even creating your own watch faces, and it make a huge difference.
Developers don’t create watch faces. Designers do. Piling tons of extra watch faces onto my watch hasn’t been even the slightest of priority, so the “NEED” in all-caps seems to be a bit dramatic.