It's been said that an updated SDK with support for "native apps" (maybe that also means untethered?) will be released some time in 2015. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/18/apple-watchkit-ios-8-2/

This first version is probably just a very early beginning of how the runtime will evolve, to put something out there before launch.

This has been confirmed by Apple

Reminds me of how the original iPhone only supported web apps, and they later came out with a full SDK.

What's more, you can't get the current properties of the interface objects (e.g. the position on screen, or text content). You can only write to them: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta....

Does that matter? If you need to know those values, you can just store them locally when you set them.

Wait, then how do you get user input at all? Just buttons? That sounds like a pain.

There seems to be some kind of dictation-based input

Yup, still MVC but the view is the only part running on the watch.

So if the phone is dead the watch won't even show the time?

Does this setup significant improve battery performance?

It looks like there are native Apple apps on the watch: they noted in the intro video that clicking on an image of a map opens up the Apple Watch's "Maps App"

You can add a map to your own app as well

You can add a non-interactive snapshot of a map.

The watch is independently able to show the time.

It also has built-in time-display capabilities in the SDK to limit the amount of traffic going between watch and phone (i.e., you don't have to manually update a timer or clock display from your own code, the watch does so locally).

Seems like all of this is meant to reduce processing on the watch side, and also to minimize the amount of data moving between watch and phone.

> Does this setup significant improve battery performance?

Not for your phone.