Fitbit versus Apple Watch

I'll admit it. I'm a bit of an Apple Watch fan. I've had an Apple Watch since launch and have made a number of Apple Watch apps.

Snappy Word for Apple Watch

Before I had an Apple Watch I was a Fitbit user. I wore theFitbit  Flex everyday and members of my family had Fitbit Zips. The Flex was a great tracking device even though the cheap rubber band kept breaking (Fitbit always sent me replacement ones). I wore my Flex with my analog watch and wished the Flex could tell the time, do heart rate tracking and was waterproof.

When Apple finally announced the Watch and I was ready to jump ship. While the first Watch wasn't waterproof it did offer the ability to make apps for it. So I passed my Flex on to my kids and proudly sported my shiny new Apple Watch.

Since then I've upgraded to the Apple Watch Series 3 LTE. Now the Watch does pretty much everything I need it to do. It's waterproof, has a great battery life, sports improved heart rate tracking and can even make phone calls!

But the Apple Watch isn't without it's failings. To be fair these are failings more on the publishing side than on the hardware side. As a developer, making apps is easy enough, but getting your app out to actual Watch users is incredibly hard. The Apple Watch Store is hidden away in the Apple Watch app and rarely updates (the same apps have been featured in Australia for the last few months). There is no best selling list or new release list to peruse and the curation is pretty much non-existent. The main App Store app occasionally features Watch apps, but this is a rare occurrence.

As an example, my last app, Skip and Save which I released earlier this year for free has had a paltry 141 downloads. The app was designed for Watch and takes advantages of complications and Watch connectivity. I reached out to Apple Watch press sites and sent out press releases - all to no avail. I would have thought that even if the app was appalling (it's not) that surely some small percentage of Watch owners would download it out of curiosity. There just isn't any real way to find Watch apps.

Skip and Save was made for Apple Watch

Despite these failings I still love my Watch.

Now it looks like the first real challenger to Apple Watch is about to arrive.

The Fitbit Versa.

Fitbit Versa

While it lacks LTE and the ability to reply to messages on Apple devices, the Versa is waterproof, sports a 4 day battery life, has GPS (on the Special Edition) and all day heart rate monitoring. And it also has the ability to run 3rd party apps. Oh, and it's cheaper. It's AUD $299.95 compared to Apple Watch AUD $459.

3rd party apps is the thing I'm most interested in.

Fitbit Versa uses Fitbit OS. Fitbit bought Pebble a while back and I'm not sure how much of the Pebble tool chain and OS is in Fitbit OS, but what they do offer is pretty cool. The development IDE is completely web based allowing you to write an App or a Watch Face in the browser and deploy to a simulator for testing.

Oh yeah, the Versa lets you make watch faces, something Apple does not. It may be that watch faces could be the killer app for the Versa. Checking out the success of watch faces on Garmin devices (the download numbers are public) it seems that even in a small ecosystem relative to Apple Watch, Garmin users are downloading watch faces by the tens of thousands.

Sadly it looks like there is no easy way for Fitbit developers to charge users for their apps - so any work done on this system will be a labor of love. Hopefully this is something they address when the Versa launches.

You can check out the Fitbit development site here.

The development language is JavaScript which is a very accessible language.

Now, the one thing I am not sure about is how Fitbit will solve the app discovery problem. I've looked at their site and can't work out where they keep the storefront for the current batch of Ionic apps (their first Fitbit OS device). Maybe it's only available from the Fitbit App when you connect an Ionic device? Either way, it doesn't look promising at the moment. But then it couldn't be any worse than Apple. I guess for both platforms they can only improve their discovery.

I'll be watching the launch closely and will be very keen to see how Fitbit deals with developers and how they promote their apps.

I hope Fitbit does well and is enough of an annoyance to Apple that Apple open up Watch faces to developers and pull their finger out to fix app discoverability.

Good luck with launch Fitbit. Here's to your success and growing a viable platform for developers to make apps for!

- Johnno