A powerful device at your wrist - Apple iOS Developer’s Perspective
First of all, I would like to start with the buyer’s perspective of whether 44k INR is worth it for you?
I would say no, yet I went ahead and pull the trigger on it. So opting in for No cost EMI x 9 months gave me a perspective of investing in my health not directly paying just once and getting over it. Also Amazon India Affiliated (Appario Seller) should have better stock management & after 3 retries of adding to cart & buying it on three different days finally, I was able to secure my order from my friend’s Amazon account.
Using the Apple watch S4 44mm for now 4 days straight, Initial experience - It is blazing fast compared to my earlier apple watch experiences from friends. Second thing if you’re even slightly concerned about your health or want a push for a healthy lifestyle, just buy this thing. I have started actively walking stairs rather than lifts & taking long routes towards my workplace in the company campus. Also taking water walking breaks frequently which promotes a healthier lifestyle.
If you want some change become the part of the change.
My Must have apps
1Password
Nano
Soundcloud
Waterminder
Runtastic
Things
Overcast
Auto Sleep
1Password (Free) Nano (Free) Flipboard (Free) Soundcloud (Free) Waterminder ($1.99) Runtastic ($3.99) Things 3 ($9.99) Overcast (Free) Auto Sleep ($2.99) Fantastical 2 ($3.99)
These are the apps I use daily & recommend anyone to improve their apple watch experience.
Apps I plan to buy in future due to their great reviews and functionality. Things 3 Fantastical 2
Use cases
Handsfree
“Hey Siri” is a great feature. You can ask any question arising from the president of USA to asking Siri to run shortcuts for your daily tasks.
Tracking
Tracking daily tasks on the watch like your water intake, steps, calories, todo lists & calendar events etc becomes way easy.
Notifications
If you don’t want to get your phone outside about 50 times in meetings or any day just to reply to the text. This device will change the way you interact with your family or friends.
Mac
Use it to unlock your Mac device without any other intervention, just keep your watch on your wrist & same Apple ID’s on both devices.
Workout
For workouts, apple watch excels in so many different aspects. Also, you could have your music library on your watch. If you own cellular version + apple music you can stream any song available in apple music.
Workarounds
If for some reason, you forgot your iPhone and have any other device like a Wifi router or any other phone which can have internet hotspot. Apple watch can connect to it & usually could perform most of its tasks aside from iPhone Notifications & Bluetooth calls.
Bigger Screen
Bigger screen size shows so much information at glance & I love it. The ability to configure the watch to your likings is totally groundbreaking. Every detail, reading apps work great on that bigger OLED screen.
Quirks
For Initial sync, you need an iPhone after that downloading apps & setting up Watch faces too. Everything is dependent on your iPhone device, So far I’m using my friend’s iPhone 7 for syncing and initial days sync up but within a month I believe iPhone would be a necessary purchase. Mac Unlock 3 / 10 works perfectly sometimes & fails more times. Lift to wake up Siri works 2/10 times I tried. Apps still haven’t supported the increased screen real estate like “Spotify” still uses Series 3 screen sizes. Hopefully, they release an improved update which also supports offline music + series 4 Infographs.
Note
You can pair only with 1 iPhone at a time as it’s authentication & encryption of the data & communication happens via hardware level chipset. Source: Apple iOS Developer.
Contribution
Feel free to fork this project & raise a pull request to add more relevant information regarding development tools used in iOS ecosystem.