With the April release of the Apple Watch getting closer, some developers have started showing off the apps they've built for Apple's first wearable, and we have two early standouts. Todoist has shared its upcoming Apple Watch app with TechCrunch, and Eleks Labs, a Ukraine-based developing group has built an app that will let you control your Tesla directly from your wrist.
Eleks' Apple Watch app displays the battery level, range, and temperature of your Tesla on the main screen, and can lock and unlock the car, turn on your headlights, and control the air conditioning. It will even allow you to honk the horn and open the sunroof. But according to Eleks, building the app was anything but easy, thanks to a number of faults within WatchKit. There is no access to the gyroscope, accelerometer, microphone, bluetooth, and Apple's haptic notification system in the emulator used to build the apps.
WatchKit isn't meeting developers' expectations
"Although the opportunities seem pretty huge with Apple Watch, unfortunately, the current capabilities of the emulator-only development don’t match the expectations set after the keynote," Markiyan Matsekh, Eleks' product manager said. "We can now confidently say that creating anything really necessary and fully functional for Apple Watch with the current SDK version is very, very difficult, and many of the things promised at launch that were perfect for some business ideas are not at all available yet."
Todoist has also shown off its app to TechCrunch, and it looks to be nearly complete. It has all the features you would expect from a to-do app; scheduling and completing tasks, a today view, replying to comments, labels, and voice control are all available on Todoist's Apple Watch app. To-do apps should play well with Apple Watch users, so expect more apps in the space to make the leap to the wrist. The Apple Watch will be available in April.