Best Apple Watch Apps: What we want to see

These are the Apple Watch apps we want to see when the Android Wear and Pebble Time rival is officially announced on March 9th

The Apple Watch invites are out. And we’re excited. But many of you may still be wondering about what you’ll do with the thing, even if you’ve already set the money aside for one.

We’re going to have to wait a little longer to see what apps we’ll one day be using with the watch, and a bit longer still to get our hands on ones that don’t require the Apple Watch to be tethered wirelessly to an iPhone 6.

But you can bet there are already exciting things afoot in the background. Here are the Apple Watch apps we want to see pop out of the tech primordial soup.

Draw Something

Remember Draw Something? Pretty much everyone in the universe played it for about three weeks in 2012. It’s time for a revival.

In Draw Something, you take it in turns to play a game of virtual Pictionary with a friend, drawing on the screen. The Apple Watch’s 1.7-inch screen size doesn’t exactly give you a huge canvas to work with, but it should be just about big enough for a quick scribble. The devs could even use the crown and accelerometer to work out a more refined way to draw without your finger, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: we’re not even used to wearing mini computers on our wrists yet.

MapMyRun

Here’s an obvious one. Techy runners are going to want to monitor their runs with their smartwatches, and while the Apple Watch does not have GPS, it can hook up to an iPhone to get a GPS signal.

We imagine running apps like Runkeeper and Map My Run will be among the first to be ported over to the Apple Watch, if only as extensions of the phone app.

While it won’t mean you can leave the house without a phone if you want full mapping, it could be put to seriously good use as a second screen, one to give you live updates on your heart rate, calories consumed and distance travelled. Thanks to its array of sensors, the Apple Watch will also make a pretty good run tracker even without GPS, as long as Apple has aced its heart rate sensor tech.

IR Blaster Control

With an IR blaster a phone can be used to control almost all your home entertainment gear: anything that uses an IR-based remote. While we can imagine controlling our TVs with an Apple Watch, there’s a little snag. The Apple Watch does not have an IR blaster.

However, there’s a way around this that we hope someone’s going to come up with. Bear with us a sec.

You get a middle-man control box that goes into your lounge and talks to your Apple Watch and iPhone over either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, converting their commands into IR signals your TV and DVR can understand. Not only would this mean you could switch channels with your Apple Watch, you’d be able to do so far further away than you could with your bog-standard remote.

Soccer Scores Pro

When thinking about whether you really want a smartwatch or not, consider what might make you want notifications even more immediate than you get from your phone. One obvious use in our minds is to keep up-to-date with live sport results. Can’t watch the game but want to know when the goals occur, right to the second? An Apple Watch version of something like Soccer Scores Pro could come in very handy.

The current phone version lets you keep track of games from more than a hundred leagues worldwide, and gives you live updates as well as plenty of post-match technical analysis. The Apple Watch also uses a pretty sophisticated vibration engine to allow for custom buzzy notifications. This should hopefully mean you’ll be able to use a very light vibrate for goal notifications if you’re, say, in a business meeting or the cinema.

Netflix Remote Control

Here’s a tricky one: using your Apple Watch as Netflix remote control. It could work wonders with Chromecast, which already pretty much operates in tandem with your phone, the handset being used as a remote. It seems almost a dead cert that we’ll see a Netflix remote app for Apple Watch released before long.

But what about those who use their PS4, Xbox One or another platform? It’s a different prospect entirely, as is not how the system currently works. It would involve the Apple Watch effectively ‘pushing’ content from one device to another. The standard Netflix plan actually lets you watch on two different devices at the same time, and while few people may know this, there’s actually an £8.99 a month service that allows you to use four devices at once.

Is this sort of control possible, then? Sure, but it would probably require some serious work at Netflix’s end.

Spotify

Netflix may not quite be ready for Apple Watch control, but Spotify certainly is. When using multiple devices with the same account, it actually prompts you to pick which device to play from, letting you control one Spotify device with another.

Apple Watch could make a fantastic Spotify controller, having virtually everything you’d need hardware-wise. And no, we’re not saying you should us a tiny virtual keyboard to type on the thing. Instead, you’ll speak any search terms into the Apple Watch’s microphone.

Don’t like feeling like a Star Trek extra? We imagine the Apple Watch’s crown would be a fantastic controller to flick through your existing playlists, Spotify’s own Discover suggestions and any recently-played albums. If this app doesn’t turn up in 2015 we’ll be very disappointed.

Sleep Monitor and Wake-up Alarm

The Apple Watch has everything it needs to become an excellent sleep monitor. It has a gyroscope and a heart rate sensor, giving it more dynamic tools than you get with a phone. And there are oodles of sleep monitor apps for phones out there.

The practical aim of sleep monitor apps is not just to see whether you’re actually only getting 2.5 hours of quality sleep each night, but also to wake you up when you’re in the right phase of sleep. Each night, you don’t go through just the one round of sleep phases, but a bunch: one work through the five sleep stages only takes as little as 90 minutes.

In our vision of the future, this app would then slowly buzz you awake with its feedback motors. However, in theory it could also hook into a wireless wake-up light to awake you with light rather than a buzz to the wrist.

Jetpack Joyride

Smartwatch games: you wouldn’t want to, would you? Well we think smartwatch games have a good chance if kept within very narrow parameters. The Apple Watch is not going to be much cop for epic action RPGs.

However, it could be perfect for endless runners that only need a single control, like the superb Jetpack Joyride. You’d use the digital crown’s button mechanism to fire-up Barry’s jetpack (he’s the main character, we didn’t just make the name up), ensuring you don’t obscure the display at all. Funnily enough, it might be the most ‘retro’ part of the Apple Watch that makes it a viable mobile gaming device.

Cyclemeter

Strava is probably the definitive cycling app, but we use it primarily to track runs for analysis afterwards. We have a different plan in mind for our Apple Watch. How about an app like Cyclemeter that’ll turn it into a cycle computer you’ll actually mount into your handlebars?

There are already plenty of phone bike mounts out there. But how about one for an Apple Watch? While you’d need a phone in tow to supply GPS, it could make a great cycle computer. Now we just need to figure out what to do with the watch strap. But, hey, clever phone accessory engineers can worry about that.

Smart Home controller: Works with Nest macro

2015 is touted as the year the whole Internet of Things will blow up, and part of this is going to be about small wireless devices that’ll control things in our houses. The company at the forefront of this is Nest, a Google-owned company that started off with a smart thermostat and has now made an infrastructure that could form the backbone of a smart home.

It’ll let the Works with Nest app control things like lights, home cameras, smart door locks and washing machines. The Apple Watch would make a great controller for this system.

How about using it to fire-off certain macros that get the lights to a certain level, set the thermostat to X degrees and switch your TV on and get it set to the PS4 channel for a bit of gaming or Netflix? Or, more practical, one that’ll let you switch off the lights and the heating when you know no-one’s in? The Apple Watch wouldn’t be the brains behind this, but would make a great way to control it.