Pebble had an ingenious design approach for its watch apps. Despite the watch having a limited processor and even more limited RAM, it could accommodate several apps, each boasting a lot of capability.
Each Pebble app was comprised of two key components: one that resided on the watch and another on the phone. Users could install these apps from Pebble's dedicated app store, and impressively, the same app was compatible with both iOS and Android. Pebble bypassed Apple's app install restrictions and cross-platform compatibility challenges by executing the on-phone portion within the platform's JavaScript engine.
One could, for example, create a weather application that fetched the weather from the Internet and displayed it on the watch. The phone component of the app would be written in JavaScript and retrieve weather updates from the Internet, which would then be conveyed to the watch's C-based app for display. Watch apps could also have a settings page that was implemented in HTML.
I've always been impressed by of the cleverness and simplicity of this design.
About the Author:
Wayne Venables is a software developer with over 20 years experience in web app development, wearable technology, dotnet, and robots.