Apple transition Apple Watch apps to native online


Benjamin May for 9 to 5 Mac:

Apple has announced that it is ending support for the original watchOS SDK and original Apple Watch 1.0 apps, which required a phone to even open. From June 1st, Apple will require developers of new Apple Watch apps to use the native SDK, which came with watchOS 2. The requirement was posted on the Apple Developer news page last night.

When the Apple Watch launched, everything was ran off of the tethered iPhone. It was less than an ideal system, but it seemed to allow for quick app adoption. The trade off is it can be slow to pull everything from the iPhone rather than run natively on the device and just pull any required data.