Five Tips to Ensure Apps Are Watch Worthy
While the jury may still be out on the business value of the Apple Watch, providers of mobile applications are apparently seeing enough demand to warrant providing support. This week, Good Technology announced that it is extending its support for the Apple Watch in its Good Work email platform to include the ability to glance at new/unread email counts and details on an upcoming meeting, as well as read emails on the watch and take actions, such as delete, flag or mark read/unread using the force press gesture. Users can also scroll through their meetings for the day and access a more detailed view that includes the organizer’s picture and any meeting notes.
Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt says initially it was relatively simple to extend the application programming interfaces (API) exposed by Apple to deliver simple notifications to the Apple Watch. Now in response to customer demand, Wyatt says Good Technology is extending that support to provide a much richer end-user experience.
It’s doubtful that Apple Watch support is going to convince any organization to replace their email platform with another. But support for the Apple Watch does illustrate the critical role email and collaboration applications will play in bringing wearable devices into the enterprise.
Like most emerging technologies, Wyatt predicts that many end users will quickly adapt to wearable devices, especially as the number of use cases in which end users will prefer to have both hands free to perform a task increases.
In addition, Wyatt notes that the presence of the Apple Watch alongside the Apple iPhone goes a long way toward simplifying two-factor authentication within an enterprise IT environment.
Obviously, Apple still has work to do in terms of extending the Apple Watch battery life alongside a number of other user experience issues. But there’s no doubt at this point that the Apple Watch and a plethora of other wearable devices are about to join the dizzying array of endpoint devices that IT organizations need to support, to one degree or another.
