The 9 best apps for Apple Watch you can get right now
Apple has the best smartphone ecosystem, the best tablet ecosystem, and as of today, the best smartwatch ecosystem when it comes to apps. But the app story is dramatically different on the Watch in a way that you won't quite understand until you start to use one.
Context & Ripple Effects
This roundup lands the day after the Watch App Store went live with Apple's own must-have list of big-name apps — Twitter, Instagram, Citymapper, Strava among them — and after developers described shipping first-gen Watch apps without ever touching the device. The Verge's claim that Apple now runs the best smartwatch app ecosystem extends its top-ranked phone and tablet app positions onto the wrist.
The verdict sits awkwardly beside the outlet's own earlier finding that the Watch has performance problems with apps and location services, which is why the piece argues the app story only makes sense once you actually wear one.
First-order effects
- New Watch buyers get an editorially curated starting lineup drawn from the same names Apple itself promoted at store launch, easing the decision of what to install first on day one.
- Developers who built blind, optimizing for simplicity over feature depth, suddenly have their work ranked and showcased — a visibility windfall for whoever made the cut.
Second-order effects
- Rival smartwatch makers now face comparison not just on hardware price or finish — where the Verge already called Apple's watch the nicest but priciest — but on third-party app breadth, a contest shaped by Apple's existing phone and tablet developer base.
- Documented app sluggishness pressures developers to strip Watch versions down to glanceable companions rather than port full iPhone experiences, setting the template for what 'good' means on a wearable.
Third-order effects
- The iPhone-reliant architecture behind those first-gen apps proved limiting: by December, a 220-day-in review found the app ecosystem had stalled, suggesting launch-time app-count leadership doesn't hold without deeper on-watch capability.
- The longer arc runs from companion-app dependence toward native watch software — visible years later in watchOS 9's pinned active apps and expanded running metrics — meaning wearable competition ultimately turns on how much computation moves off the phone.
The trend: Smartwatch platforms compete first on borrowed phone-app catalogs, then stall or advance based on how quickly software becomes genuinely independent of the handset.