Dark Sky is the crowd’s favorite again!
Wristly Apple Watch Insider’s Report #17
August 25th, 2015
More than 1,300 of you completed the Wristly Apple Watch survey this week. That’s a record for us to date — thank you! Please continue to share and suggest to friends and others to join too. What did we learn?
Dark Sky remains your top favorite!
We have polled our panel 3 times on their favorite third party Apps over the last few months and the trio of winners hasn’t changed. Dark Sky remains the crowd favorite with almost twice as many votes as the second placed App. Overcast and Fantastical have been jockeying for the #2 spot, and this time around Overcast takes that honor! Worth noting is that “Weather App” is by far the most frequently cited category with others including AccuWeather, CarrotWeather and WeatherChannel being frequently cited too. You can check the Top 10 on our site here.
Not (yet?) a media consumption device
As expected by many, and based on its form factor, the Apple Watch is indeed not a device appropriate for the consumption of a whole lot of media type content. Listening a bit to music and the odd podcast is the only activity that shows any regular usage for a representative segment of the panel. Almost 30% of you listen to music on a weekly basis and about 16% to podcasts. For the rest of the us, the Watch isn’t used much, if at all, for music, photos or other video type content.
Potentially “Photos” could see some increased usage with the upcoming ability, as part of WatchOS 2.0, to customize the Watch face using a personal photo?
A minority use headsets
About 30% of you have decided to use a bluetooth connected headset with your Apple Watch — this seems quite high vs iPhone only users. Not surprisingly, this cohort of user shows a much higher likelihood of listening to music/podcast. Almost half of this cohort — at 46% do listen to streaming music.
How much of an Apple fan are you?
We’ve known since inception that our research experiment would have somewhat of a positive bias towards Apple due to our recruitment method but that this would be tuned down as we increased the scale of the panel.
We have decided to try to quantify our “bias” if any, and as a result asked you if you also owned an Apple TV. And yes, as many as 77% of you state that you do!
We will use this information in future analysis to determine the differences, if any, between those of you who have an Apple TV vs the remainder of the panel.
First look into Apple Music
Besides ownership of Apple TV, we were also interested to understand the intersection of the Apple Watch with the recently introduced Apple Music. Just about two months post its introduction we got some remarkable insights.
Over 99% of you are aware of Apple Music — this speaks to the marketing power of Apple. Of those, a whopping 71% have started a trial. The remaining 28% either are not interested at all in streaming music (17%) or are currently happy with an alternative solution like Spotify (11%).
Even more interesting, Apple publicly stated last week that only 21% of Apple Music subscribers had stopped their free trial. Our data not only seems to support this claim, but we can shed some further light on intention to convert to paid subscription once the free trial period ends.
When we analyze the cohort of the 71% of our users who’ve started a trial of Apple Music, only 10% have decided that they would not buy it, 55% claiming that they will buy it and 35% remain undecided.
A 55% conversion rate would already be a big win for Apple, but if we additionally consider that a portion of the “undecided” will also convert to a paid subscription, then the total conversion rate from trial to purchase could rise as high as 65%-70% — which would be an astounding result!
If you enjoyed this report can you please recommend it here on Medium, and also share it on Facebook, Twitter etc.
Of course also continue to refer family members, friends and colleagues who also have the Apple Watch to our research project. We have no marketing budget nor resources. Only your support and your voice allows us to grow week after week.
New members can easily join of our site.
