A little update because I'm getting questions on a watchOS 2 version of
the iPeng Watch App.
I have experimented with this quite a bit and I'm still a bit undecided
about what to do.
The decision to switch to a native watchOS 2 App or not is unfortunately
not as straightforward as it looks at first glance.
There are several aspects impacting the decision and people generally
expect improvements through the use of watchOS 2:
- Performance
- Support using the crown and sensor access
- Being able to run Apps when the watch is unavailable
- Additional features like browsing content
- Design improvements
Unfortunately it turns out that in reality not all these points profit
from a switch to watchOS 2.
PERFORMANCE
Performance is the first and most important point here. Most users
expected the performance, especially the start time to improve for
watchOS 2 Apps but unfortunately the opposite is true. With watchOS 1
the actual App is running on the iPhone and the watch only launches a
set of resources. Turns out the bottleneck in the whole process is not
the (fast) iPhone but the slow processor and memory on the watch.
watchOS 2 Apps are generally bigger and have to run initialization code
on the watch so they take LONGER to launch.
This is bad.
What is worse, though, is that actually doing things on the watch is
also slow and there are things you can't do at all. For example, iPeng
has these scrolling titles to show titles that don't fully fit the
screen. These can't get rendered on the watch so if the App actually
runs on the watch it still needs to call the phone for that and this is
now not just an upload but a roundtrip and takes longer than before.
The same is true for generating the background images, scaling images,
communicating with MySqueezebox.com (communicating with local servers
works directly from the watch), changing players and some other
functionality.
There is one aspect where things are easier on the watch which is memory
use. watchOS 2 Apps can use more memory than watchOS 1 Apps on the phone
could but then on the phone it was always easy (and fast) to use the
main App which is even less memory restricted.
So from a performance standpoint moving to watchOS 2 would be a step
backwards
ACCESS TO CROWN AND SENSORS
Being able to change the volume using the crown would actually be the
most important improvement in a watchOS 2 App and it's actually the one
single reason I still consider it.
Sensors... iPeng is not a health or sports App. Period.
BEING ABLE TO RUN APPS WHEN THE WATCH IS UNAVAILABLE
Also almost a nonstarter. There are a few edge cases where this might
work (App already launched and track doesn't skip and,...) but in most
cases the watch App still needs information from the phone.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
Feature implementation is actually more constrained by what makes sense
on the UI than where the App runs. Actually having worse performance
doesn't really help, too.
DESIGN
Dis is actually another aspect haunting me a bit. scrolling labels.
Blurred backgrounds. Exactly scaled images (bad scaling has a tendency
to _really_ look bad on the watch and it comes in two different
resolutions). All of this has to be done by the companion App on the
phone even in watchOS 2 and this means it creates a roundtrip impacting
performance.
So... in the end it boils down whether I'm willing to accept worse
performance to be able to use the crown.
For now I have decided to stick to the watchOS 1 version. Maybe Apple
finds ways to improve performance on the watch or adds at least some
graphics functionality and that will make it easier but for now I feel
like the watch is slow enough to require every bit of performance
optimization I can get and using watchOS 2 really doesn't help with
that.
---
learn more about iPeng, the iPhone and iPad remote for the Squeezebox
and
Logitech UE Smart Radio as well as iPeng Party, the free Party-App,
at penguinlovesmusic.com
*New: iPeng 9, the Universal App for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=103693
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