For Apple Watch users, this year’s watchOS 10 upgrade packs a handful of major changes with redesigned apps, widgets support, and more. In a new interview with Tom’s Guide, Apple goes in-depth on these new features with a particular focus on what the new features mean for third-party developers and their watchOS apps.
Eric Charles, a member of Apple’s Worldwide Product Marketing team, explained that the goal of watchOS 10 is to give users access to “more information at a glance than ever before” when they raise their wrist. Part of this comes with Apple’s new design language for built-in apps on the Apple Watch:
“We’re really leaning into the idea of using the entire display to create more places for content,” Charles said. “This has shown really well in an app like Weather, where now you can see AQI, you can see wind speed, you can see your up-to-date data without having to go deeper into the app. It increases discoverability, it increases glanceability.”
But with these changes to watchOS 10 come potential headaches for Apple Watch users who were familiar with the old style of Apple Watch apps and navigation, as pointed out by Tom’s Guide editor Kate Kozuach. Apple, however, believes users will quickly adjust to these changes and that the user will understand the benefits of the changes:
“I think it’s going to be really easy for people to parse out, especially for something as simple as Control Center,” Charles said. “That convenience and expediency will make it really easy to sort of do that mental map to be like, ‘this button now brings up this thing.’ We think that the clarity of having the Digital Crown for apps and the side button for the Control Center will be really easy for our consumers to adapt to.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Charles touted the importance of Apple Watch developers:
“We take feedback from anywhere, so we’re always talking to the developers in our developer community,” Charles said. “We love hearing from them when we introduce a new API to understand how it works for them, and then to even get a sense of what it doesn’t do. Like if it doesn’t go far enough. We welcome that type of suggestion and feedback.”
The full interview at Tom’s Guide is well worth a read and offers some interesting tidbits on some of the new features coming to Workouts in watchOS 10.
Follow Chance: Threads, Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments