Watch Apps - Do we need them?
Now before anyone jumps the gun and thinks that this post is simply about bashing the notion of a watch app and smart watches in general, let me assure you I have been an Apple Watch user from day one. I’m still wearing and using my Apple Watch Series 0 that I purchased on release day.
If you own a smart watch then you likely have a good reason to download a watch app. The most common group of watch app users are people who love to keep fit. There are many apps out there that will help you track your performance, set goals, and track your burned calories etc… perfect for this group of people. Another popular area are people who use a watch app for health monitoring, users are able to track their heart rate, some even allow you to do an ECG without the need for an external device (more about the ECG here and here).
There are so many more reasons for downloading a watch app besides health and fitness. You can use it for listening to music, tracking your sleep, work assistants, voice assistants, access to home automation to name just a few.
There is a category of applications that use a watch app to stay in the loop with the latest news, complete with real-time updates. Some of these apps allow you to browse a list of trending articles or categories on your watch; Flipboard being one of them.
These news apps, rework the content to make better use of the smaller display, they are more lightweight on images and remove components found in the standard online article to improve the reading flow.
In 2018 the News & Weather category accounted for 87.6% of the Market reach of the most popular mobile app categories in the United States.
In the UK, Ofcom published a report indicating that in the category of most used platform for consuming news by UK adults, saw the internet at 64% of users and Newspapers with a smaller audience at 40%.
However, for 16–24 year olds, the internet was the most popular category at 82%. Of all those aged adults 16+, 91% of them owned a personal mobile phone, 76% of which were smart phones. News is popular with the younger audience and they use technology to get it.
The smart mobile phone has changed the way we get access to, and consume our news. Users go to mobile friendly websites or use a news app for fast access wherever they are. The mobile screen size is perfect for quick and easy consumption of content that most interests users .
Does a watches screen, lend itself to being a great way of consuming news content as well?
Recently one of our developers put forward the idea of doing a watch app for all our mobile app publications. Reach PLC has separate iOS and Android Apps for many of its publications. Each mobile platform has a single code base that generates around 37 differently branded news apps for our regional and national publications. So if we produced a watch app to work along side our mobile apps, we would be releasing around 74 watch apps across WatchOS and Android Wear.
One side benefit to having a watch app, it is good for App Store Presence (ASP) and we work in a very crowded news sector. More visibility on App Stores is hard to achieve, so this could help.
There is a bigger question. Do our news apps really need one?
I’m confident in saying, that I am a savvy smart watch user and the way I use it has shaped my opinion of smart watch apps. I fall squarely into the group that use a smart watch as an extension to your main digital device, in my case an iPhone X. For example, being notified of something important quickly and simply is perfect for how I use my smart watch, and that’s all through push notifications.
Notification Glances on Watch OS and Wear OS can easily provide enough information at-a-glance, that one doesn’t need to install an app on their smart watch. A push notification allows for a quick scan of a headline, and if it’s of interest, the user can pick up their smart device and read it.
This experience appears to be better than trying to hold up one’s arm for an extended period and reading an article on a small watch display. So isn’t that all anyone would need in terms of news on a watch?
Let’s look at this from the other side. Push notifications are great, but you don’t choose what you get sent, that’s all done by the news editors. So while one story about Brexit might make me groan with annoyance and ignore, others like Spurs winning the champions league certainly will get me to engage (Yes it’s a dream, don’t hate me for it).
One area where a watch app might be useful is removing the reliance on push notifications.
Many smart device users do not like push notifications, so a news-based watch app could allow one to browse… say, the most recent 20 articles at any given time. Then give them the facility to select and read one. Alternatively, the watch app could provide all the articles in our Top Stories category and allow the user to browse and read them all.
It turns out that news updates account for around 30% of what a smart watch is used for, Notification and fitness tracking being the top uses at 54% and 45% respectively. So there is some scope for a type of news app.
But, is that the right experience?
How many people of that 30% read a whole article on their watch? Do they simply pick up their Smart Phone and continue reading it there? This is something we will need to research especially in terms of user behaviour.
Does a user who wants to know the latest news, go to their watch, or their smart phone first? The numbers say that the smart phone rules the day, however that might be becuase smart watch shipments were around 50 million in 2018 compared with 1.56 billion smart phones. There just aren’t many smart watches versus smart mobiles.
The metaphorical fence I am currently perched on does have the designer in me wanting to do a watch app, and I already have some ideas about how we can keep the concept of glances, but use that to promote a reading experience on the smart mobile - as long as the handoff is done right.
I can’t however ignore the numbers, smart watches are still a fairly niche market that’s aimed mostly at health and fitness, rather than news.
Reach PLC, the largest publisher in the UK is always looking at new markets, so “Would a smart watch be ideal for our users and have a positive ROI?” This is going to require teams to come together, lots of research around the hypothesis and making a decision on what the data shows us.
My instincts say, not right now.
