This guy actively went the hard path. He didn’t need to do the for Kids pairing. It’s actually a case study in getting too in the weeds of a problem that’s tangential to what you’re trying to solve: good health reporting.
Some of the article you’d probably still want to do with Android, however (e.g. calendar syncing).
That said, I got an Apple Watch to attempt to replace my cell phone when leaving the house, but Apple seems to intentionally or nonintentionally wants to sabotage this use case.
I think a perfect example is swipe to type. It’s would actually be easy to type on the watch if it supported this.
It’s been a few years, so I might be out of date here, but the last update here was that there was an app that supported this (FlickType, only for Messages because app APIs, sure fine) but Apple banned the app after a lengthy but successful App Store approval and several updates (it appears to be back now).
I consistently ran into issues similar to this, where a solution was so obvious but Apple either totally missed it or seemed to actively make the issue harder without a phone.
I wish a wrote a blog post at the time about each one but I didn’t. Syncing music also comes to mind — I think you had to sync specific playlists, not your library, and it really, really sucked with almost no feedback. You also needed the iPhone watch app to do it — sync to phone then sync to watch. I was surprised Apple shipped it.
This comes from a happy macOS, Arch Linux and iPhone user who buys/uses an Android every 5 years for a year.
I’m going to charge the watch and update it to see if Apple implemented it. I just don’t think Apple is interested nor financially motivated to make the watch a first class citizen.
Has it been a bad experience? I feel bad about how much time I spend staring at my phone, and I think the watch would be the ideal form factor for me, but I haven’t pulled the trigger because it feels silly spending more money on tech to reduce my dependency on tech
Some of the article you’d probably still want to do with Android, however (e.g. calendar syncing).
That said, I got an Apple Watch to attempt to replace my cell phone when leaving the house, but Apple seems to intentionally or nonintentionally wants to sabotage this use case.