Wearables: The Next Bold Frontier in Custom App Development

As recently as five years ago, it was easy to look at wearable technology as something of a novelty. “Smart watches” and other wearable tech items of the day resembled Dick Tracy’s classic video communicator watch more than anything that people would remotely consider using on a daily basis, so it was difficult for many to take the entire medium seriously. It seemed poised to be the type of niche product that a few die-hard tech aficionados would savor and very few other people would pursue.

Then, Apple released the Apple Watch and everything changed, both for all time and for the better.

Practically overnight, wearables went from something only used by fitness fanatics to something to take seriously. The market value for wearables is predicted to grow to over $12.5 billion dollars by 2018, with over 111.9 million units shipped worldwide by the same period of time. Right now, approximately 40% of customers in the United States are interested in buying a smart watch of some type, and that trend is only expected to continue as time goes on.

Are you interested yet? If you’re a custom app developer, you really should be.

How to Succeed in the Wearable Battleground

Screenwriter Joss Whedon once wrote, “The thing about changing the world … Once you do it, the world’s all different.” The same is true in terms of the type of significant disruptive shift that wearable technology represents to the way people currently interact with their technology. Part of the reason why early examples of wearable tech had a tendency to flounder had nothing to do with the hardware on display, which was actually quite advanced. It had to do with the software that these devices were armed with and the decided lack of functionality that they offered when compared to what people were actually wanting. Custom app developers were essentially trying to take the software they were already designing and cram it onto what they saw as just a “small computer.” Instead, they should have stopped looking backwards and started looking forwards.

It would be a mistake to think that people are going to invest in a smart watch and suddenly leave their smartphone behind at home each day when they head to work. With wearable tech, people aren’t looking for a supplementary experience to the devices they’re already using like they were with the smartphone. The iPhone and every smartphone that followed in its wake were designed to essentially combine several required items into one for user convenience. It was one device that could do it all, wherever you needed it to be.

It’s About Adding to an Existing Experience

Wearable tech, on the other hand, isn’t intended to replace anything. The fact that you can get text messages on your smart watch doesn’t mean you no longer need your phone. It means that it’s now easier to see who just sent you an SMS text message without taking your phone out of your pocket.

In many ways, it’s an almost identical shift to the “app boom” of the past ten years. An application in 1995 had to essentially be a Swiss Army Knife in order to stand out in a crowded marketplace. It couldn’t just be a word processor – it also had to print mailing labels, design posters, perform advanced cell spreadsheet calculations and more. With apps in 2015, the landscape shifted from “do as many things as you can” to “do one thing incredibly well.”

Custom app development in the wearable realm essentially requires a similar shift in the way that we’re thinking about the casino apps that we’re developing on a daily basis. A failure to recognize this simple fact now means that you’ll be playing catch-up for the next few years while competitors don’t just allow us to do new things with wearables, but allow us to do what we’re already doing even better than before.

Image by freepik.com.