Linked List: February 27, 2018

Tuesday, 27 February 2018

Marco Arment: ‘WatchKit Is a Sweet Solution That Will Only Ever Give Us Baby Apps’ ★

Marco Arment:

Developing Apple Watch apps is extremely frustrating and limited for one big reason: unlike on iOS, Apple doesn’t give app developers access to the same watchOS frameworks that they use on Apple Watch.

Instead, we’re only allowed to use WatchKit, a baby UI framework that would’ve seemed rudimentary to developers even in the 1990s. But unlike the iPhone’s web apps, WatchKit doesn’t appear to be a stopgap — it seems to be Apple’s long-term solution to third-party app development on the Apple Watch.

I long ago gave up on using any third-party apps on my Apple Watch, and I am so much happier for it. A year or two ago I would have been “Hell yeah”-ing this piece by Arment, but at this point I half feel like Apple should just get rid of third-party WatchOS apps and be done with it.

The one type of app I think most people want is the one type of app Apple is never going to allow: custom watch faces. After that, the only good thing on Apple Watch is receiving (and responding to) notifications and fitness tracking.

I do think Arment is exactly right though that WatchKit will never be “good” until it’s more or less the same set of APIs that Apple uses for their own apps. Apple needs to eat its own cooking.

Apple Launching Medical Clinics for Employees ★

Christina Farr, reporting for CNBC:

Apple is launching a group of health clinics called AC Wellness for its employees and their families this spring, according to several sources familiar with the company’s plans.

The company quietly published a website, acwellness.com, with more details about its initiative and a careers page listing jobs including primary care doctor, exercise coach and care navigator, as well as a phlebotomist to administer lab tests on-site.

Seems like a great perk, but would you really want to have your primary care physician tied to your employment? What happens if you love your doctor but leave Apple?

If You Were Wondering Which Android Handset Maker Would Be the First to Shamelessly Copy the iPhone X’s Notch, We Have a Winner ★

Ian Cutress, reporting for AnandTech:

Today Asus is launching a smartphone that is designed, according to the speaker at our pre-briefing, to make it look like the user is holding an iPhone X. The new Asus ZenFone 5, part of the ZenFone 5 family, comes with a notch. Apparently this is what the company says that its customers want: the ability to look as if you have an iPhone X, but have something else.

They didn’t even get the shape of the notch right. And it still has a chin. It’s less like a rip-off of an iPhone X than it is like a parody of a rip-off.

Amazon to Acquire Ring for ‘More Than $1 Billion’ ★

GeekWire:

Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire Ring, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based maker of video cameras, doorbells and other smart home technologies, GeekWire has learned. The companies are expected to announce the acquisition this afternoon.

The surprise acquisition marks the latest move by the Seattle-based tech giant into the smart home technology market. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Reuters puts the deal at more than $1 billion. Amazon is expected to treat the Ring deal similar to past acquisitions such as Zappos, Twitch and Audible, pursuing product and feature integrations where appropriate but maintaining the Ring brand and largely allowing the company to continue operating as it has in the past.

I’m not surprised in the least that Amazon would want to sell video monitoring doorbells, but I’m a little surprised they acquired Ring rather than just creating their own hardware. Maybe Ring already has more brand recognition than I realize?

I’ve been thinking about getting a Ring doorbell. I’m not sure if this deal makes me more likely or less likely to do so. I’m skeptical about the actual utility of a lot of “smart home” products, but a doorbell camera you can monitor from anywhere really does seem compelling.