It became less trendy in the news but the user base is consistently growing (source - https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/11/there-are-more-than-100-milli... ).

Yeah, sales declined massively from 6 to only 5.2 million units last quarter. An estimated 100m active users. Dead in the water!

Oh man, only 5% grow? That's the death knell.

I run a system that syncs with all the fitness trackers. Apple watch devices present in our system just keep growing.

> Apple Watch seems to have declined in use…

Source please.

I am guessing you mean the popularity of Apple Watch as a developer platform, which is totally correct. In fact, it might be the first platform where developers said “sorry Apple, we aren’t interested in making you more money.”

Most development around the apple watch caters to using the data somehow rather than actively running code on the watch. Even if all you're doing is number crunching you're ultimately creating demand for the device.

I don't typically see many good use cases for running your own apps on the watch but there's many medical/fitness applications for the data itself.

Developers always want to “build relationships with Apple” by implementing the silliest ports of their existing apps for new devices: Apple Watch, Apple TV.

I think the developers actually said "people keep either not installing or uninstalling watch apps that don't make sense to be on a watch so there is no point"

My watch only has a few apps outside of fitness and alerting, everything else gets deleted. I found Audible and podcasting apps useful.

Speaking as a Day 1 Apple Watch owner, not as a watchOS developer.

I think the first generation of Apple Watches were woefully underpowered for what they pitched as a development platform. The resources were very limited. Developers had to nail optimizations, and that was a shock in today's world where too many developers just npm install or pip3 install their problems away. It's very telling that early on, despite having a ton of apps, the fastest, most stable ones were the included ones by Apple and Google Maps.

The result were a ton of slow, crashy apps with poor connection reliability. Users, myself included, got pissed, blamed the apps, and developers just said this wasn't worth it.

/s I assume?

I took it seriously at first. Anecdotally, I see them being worn much less by my peers than 2-3 years ago. Cool/newness factor died, IMO. Then I looked at stats:

> Apple shipped 7.6 million smartwatches worldwide in the first quarter of 2020, according to recent data from Strategy Analytics, an increase of 23% compared to 6.2 million in the first quarter of 2019. As such, Apple now claims 55% of the smartwatch market, representing a slight increase from the 54% it controlled in the same period one year ago, according to the research firm. [0]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-watch-sales-numbers-st...

Also: https://www.statista.com/chart/15035/worldwide-smartwatch-sh...

While the coolness factor has gone down (anecdotally, I've gone back to wearing a nice watch when out on date or something; or I would if going out was still a thing) people are still using the Apple watch for everything else.

I've had both a Polar and Garmin watch and neither were close to my Apple 3 for GPS accuracy or heart rate. My wife has a 2020 Garmin and we stand around waiting for her watch to get all of it's "bars"

I traded out my Apple Watch for the Garmin Forerunner 245 (2019), and couldn't be happier. The newer Apple Watches may have improved on these since I had an Apple Watch 3.

* The 245 locks GPS really, really fast. I never have to wait for it. Much, much faster than my older 630. The Apple Watch doesn't even tell you if it has locked a signal. I think it would lock fast if I had my phone with me, since it would use the phone's GPS to save watch battery, but I think it would be confused if I left my phone in the house while stepping out the front door for a run.

* The 245 has physical buttons that reliably work with sweaty fingers in the summer and with gloves in the winter. So many times I couldn't stop a workout on the Apple Watch because of the swipe needed.

* Display is always on, no need to raise my arm directly in front of my face to turn it on. Too many times I had to raise or twist my arm multiple times to see my pace with Apple.

The Apple Watch battery life whilst using GPS is something like 5 or 6 hours, right? I don't know about a 245 but my Garmin watch does double that normally, and over a day in the less accurate ultratrac mode. And yes, I have required more than 5 hours on a few occasions. 5 hours is probably enough for most people most of the time but it's lacking compared to what a real sports watch can do and I personally wouldn't pay top money for Apple's half-arsed version.

Oh man, yeah, the sweat thing is painful. I don't know why they can't have the buttons work in "water mode". I sweat a lot in the summer and run in the rain ...