From iPhone App to Apple Watch App

When the iPhone SDK came out in 2008, developers struggled to find the right balance. They had Mac apps with tons of great features, but not all of those features made sense on iPhones of the time. Apple gave some guidance, suggesting to developers that they aggressively pare down their apps’ feature sets in the transition from OS X to iOS. As time went on, iOS apps became more full-featured than those initial apps, especially with the introduction of the iPad, but OS X apps are still, by nature, more complex.

The Apple Watch and its WatchKit SDK bring us to another such point in time. Not every single feature makes sense to bring from your iPhone app to its WatchKit extension, and some just flat out don’t ...

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