The official blog for Numerous. Life's most important numbers available at a glance.
Why We’re Betting Big on Apple Watch
Charlie Wood
24 April 2015
DFJ partner Bubba Murarka recently wrote a series of posts asking Should you build for the Apple Watch platform? We knew our answer to the question before the watch was even formally announced. The hand-in-glove fit of Numerous and Apple Watch made it a no-brainer. Here’s why.
To quote our tagline, Numerous makes life’s most important numbers available at a glance. It pulls data from virtually any application, device, or service and makes it available to you immediately. And when we say “immediately”, we’re talking sub-second interactions.
People use Numerous to stay up to date on numbers from an amazing variety of sources, from Google Sheets, Calendar, and Analytics to Nest thermostats and smoke alarms, from Strava and Fitbit data to anything connected to IFTTT or Zapier. People have also done some amazing stuff with the Numerous API.
It’s all data you can get to in another way. But there’s no way to get to it all more immediately, and as it turns out, immediacy is incredibly important. And because Numerous presents it all in a deceptively simple interface with a single interaction model for notifications, sharing, and privacy, interacting with your numbers suddenly requires dramatically less attention. This model translates perfectly to Apple Watch.
Apple puts it to developers this way:
Apps on Apple Watch are designed for quick, lightweight interactions that make the most of the display size and the watch’s position on the wrist. Information is accessible and dismissible quickly and easily, for both privacy and usability. The short-look notification, for example, is a minimal alert, revealing more information only if the wearer remains engaged. Glances provide information from apps in an easy-to-access, swipeable interface. Apps designed for Apple Watch should respect the context in which the wearer experiences them: briefly, frequently, and on a small display.
The lightweight interaction model, designed for frequent, brief experiences aligns perfectly with how people use Numerous. And the small display is ideal for showing a single tile from Numerous for iOS.
So the question of whether or not to build for Apple Watch was never a question for us. Even with a small team and limited resources, we never had any doubt that Apple’s newest device would be an ideal platform for Numerous.
Numerous for Apple Watch is now available on the App Store.
