Android Wear and an Update on My First Android App

Over the Christmas holiday I dove in head first with Android Wear, and by that I mean I both bought a watch and developed an app (which of course, means it’s a stupid silly app as that is all that I make in my free time). So now, two months later, I figured it would be a good point to step back and see if it was a good move or just a project for my time off of work.

Android Wear

Android Wear on the whole has been…OK…fine. It’s useful to see notifications when my phone is buried or somewhere else in the house, but there isn’t that killer app. For example, if I’m 5 minutes down the road to work and I forgot my phone, I’m going back. When I realize I forgot my watch, I just keep going. After I heard that Android Wear sales are sluggish at best, with only about 720k watches shipped last year, my reaction must be pretty average. My hope is that Android Wear will have new life once the world gets a real look at the Apple Watch, but it will take a while for Google and the developer community to react to the new ideas presented with Apple Watch. The biggest issue for Wear though, and one that any cool Apple Watch ideas can’t fix, is the fact you have to run at least Android 4.4 to use Wear and that’s still a fairly small amount of devices. Until that number gets bigger, I fear that Android Wear will continue to be a add-on feature rather than a platform that will get specific app love.

My App

App sales have been pretty weak, but if the deck was already stacked against me making an Android Wear-focused app, I made it worse by charging for my app (which…I mean, damn the app economy is messed up). It was fun to make an Android app and good experience to get an app in an App Store somewhere, but if the plan was to even make enough to pay for my Sony Smart Watch 3, then…um…I’ve got a while to go still.

Going Forward

For a few years now I’ve gone back and forth from Android to iOS every other year and I expect that schedule to continue, meaning my Moto X (2014), my Sony Smartwatch 3 and I will continue our relationship until at least this fall. I’m excited to see what Google has in store for Android Wear at Google IO later this year, and, while I have no plans to buy one, I’m excited to see what the release of the Apple Watch brings. I’ll let someone else try their hand at making a digital whoopee cushion with a watch-operated trigger for iOS.