Six Years Perfecting Maps on WatchOS
david-smith.org296 points by valzevul 13 hours ago
296 points by valzevul 13 hours ago
The fact that there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure, not even on the most expensive “made for explorers” Watch Ultra. And things like gpx import is just a mere dream
It’s a lifestyle device after all but still
> there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure
I remember a time when Apple was chided for integrating functionalities of popular apps into its OS.
Apple created an incredibly awesome device, and its up to the market to make full use of its potential. Why would it be a failure for Apple to not make such an app?
Because they don't allow deeper integrations maybe? I still don't have a watch face layout I like.
Oh and while I'm here the single layer non editable menu / weird grid is also the worst. I grew up texting under the desk on a nine key and only checking after I'd selected the contact to send to. Give me that level of muscle memory again someone, anyone, please.
I made Type Nine for iPhone, and have waited a long time for Apple to open up for doing it on the watch.
PS. I typed this under my desk!
Pebble watches are operated with physical buttons and you can definitely take advantage of muscle memory.
Also Garmin watches. E.g. the Fenix line has 5 buttons and you can do pretty much everything with the buttons. So much handier than fooling around on small touch screens when you are e.g. on a bike or hiking (it does have a touch screen too). Also, the battery lasts up to several weeks (depending on the model), so you don't have to worry about it. Plus great support for using maps during a workout.
I also have an Apple Watch Ultra. My feeling has always been that Apple Watch Ultra is a smartwatch first, sports watch second. Garmin watches are sports watches first, smartwatch second.
I was an early adopter of smartwatches with first the Moto 360 and then Apple Watch Series 1 and I have found that I use the smartwatch part less and less. In the end I only used it for notifications for two apps (Signal and WhatsApp), sometimes for calling my wife when I'm on a bike, and contactless payments. These I can do with a Garmin as well, but it far less clumsy as a sports watch than Apple Watch.
Plus Garmin Watches generally work with GadgetBridge, so they are much easier to use in a privacy-preserving way.
That is quite literally how every part of Cocoa was polished. Things such as sidebars, notifications, came from third party libraries, Growl, etc. were all design patterns from the community. Isn't that also how iTunes came to be? Apple trying to acquire the best music players to integrate into its ecosystem? It's somewhat sad to observe what become of apple.
maybe the culture should be for them to contract with popular app makers to be "The" default app for x amount of years or such, vs sherlocking.
That’s a somewhat obvious flattening of perspective. While it’s clever we can make both positions sound silly, it illuminates nothing while throwing shade.
Apple is so intent on making the Apple Watch a catch-all that it doesn’t necessarily do any specific activity amazingly. After three Apple Watches over many years I finally sold my 10 last year and won’t be buying another. I bought a Coros and am pretty pleased with it, would consider a Garmin in the future. Coros and Garmin devices are built with activity in mind and not unneeded apps, like Uber. Garmin and Coros both have maps too.
With Garmin you have to pay attention to the model though. E.g. cheaper Forerunners, Instinct, etc. do not support maps, though some support breadcrumb trail navigation. Then there are some models that do not support it, but have third party apps that add maps. For the models that do (e.g. Fenix, Venu X1, high-end forerunners), it is glorious though. There is a large community making specialized maps (typically based on OpenStreetMap) for Garmin Watches and GPSr units. Installation is typically as easy as dropping an .img file in the right folder on the Watch/GPSr.
Also Garmin's own maps are based on OpenStreetMap and have become pretty good.
Also worth mentioning (probably the same with Coros) that these are offline maps, so they always work, and you typically install them for a whole continent.
And I am happy with my Huawei GT-6 41mm. Looks like an actual real watch unlike the Apple ones, does everything Apple does, just no third party apps. Guess what, never needed one. Battery lasts a week instead of a day. Very refreshing to end the day with 91% battery left rather than 11%.
I trust people like David Smith and companies like onX more than Apple when it comes to creating and supporting a top tier outdoor mapping app.
Maybe some people are too young to remember Apple's Maps v1. Even Tim Apple recently mentioned that debacle in what was essentially an exit interview.
I recently switched back to Google Maps after Apple announced ads were coming to Apple Maps, since if the default Maps app is going to be saddled with ads on my thousands of dollars worth of Apple hardware anyway, I may as well use the best. And yeah, let’s be honest, Apple Maps is good enough for most use cases, but Google Maps blows it out of the fucking water.
In that light, I may be hard pressed to call it a debacle, but it’s still third-rate.
For sports OpenStreetMap is much better anyway, in most countries it has many more hiking/cycling/MTB trails. More details on relevant POIs (water points, bathrooms, etc.). Plus there are many specialized versions like Open Fiets Map (cycling), Freizeitkarte (general outdoors), OpenMTB (mountainbiking and hiking), etc.
Currently I'm using Garmin's version of OpenStreetMap + an overlay for the Dutch cycle path network [1] on my watch.
[1] If you are in the Netherlands, this is a gem: https://planner.gps.nl/download.php?toolid=1 . Download the device version, copy it to your Garmin gpsr or Watch and you have a very nice overlay of the cycle network with nodes (knooppunten), etc.
> no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch
I regularly use hiking and topography maps on my Apple Watch with the first party maps app, so it sure what you’re talking about
Honestly, the less Apple made apps, the better for the ecosystem and the quality of the apps in general. Apple's recent "sherlocked" apps are not good quality at all, but they make it substantially more difficult for 3rd parties to compete with the now default offerings.
Not a developer, but I feel like Apple improving the defaults has been good for the ecosystem. The Reminders app is an example of this, because as it has gotten better over the years, the baseline for a good iOS to-do app has been raised, without reducing the market.
I agree 100%. I ended up building myself a utility to wrangle my reminders (like keep them from getting missed/lost) instead of using a third-party app.
Can you describe that utility?
Yeah! I mean I published it on the app store, too. It does three core things: 1) Makes sure every reminder gets a date and time if it doesn't have one 2) Snowplows them ahead of you, so if you go on vacation they're still in the near future 3) Moves reminders out of the way if you accept or create a calendar event conflicting with it
It also preserves ordering when moving things (hence my snowplow approach).
Soon it'll summarize what you did that day so you can feel good about what you get done - that's coming shortly, I'm testing the feature for another few days.
There are a bunch of settings to tweak this - picking what reminder lists to include, setting a time window for when it'll reschedule things, etc.
This should link to it:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reminder-wrangler/id6759400510
Nice try, Claude Code
Is that meant to be a joke? I've been on HN for over a decade. Closer to ELIZA's era than that of LLMs.
I'm curious because I'm also interested in hacking the Reminders app via its API, to add some features in a side app
If you try it out, I'm curious what you'd add! I'd be happy to make improvements.
Generally speaking, Apple should be improving and adding to the base operating system all the time, including new apps. It is better for their users including new users if the phone itself is capable of more out of the box.
Where they fall short though, the App Store is right there. There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.
> There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.
That alternative comes with a $60/year subscription these days, though.
I don’t know what you’re paying for that you see a $60/year subscription, but if it’s worth the $60/year to you, then you pay it. If it’s not, you don’t.
There are two apps I pay for that replace an app on my phone: $15/year for Overcast replaces Apple Podcasts and & $25/year for Transit replacing the transit function in Apple Maps (which I may be able to drop now that I’m on Google Maps, but I haven’t tried yet, and the app is so damn good I’m not sure I want to). Those are easily two of the absolute best and most used apps on my phone.
But if you don’t want to spend money on another vendor, or there is nothing suitable for the price you want to pay, at least the phone often has something serviceable.
Is it? They have a platform you can run other apps on, and this one in TFA and others provides this functionality.
I don't know if anybody else is so petty like me regarding installing new apps but while I can't say anything about the app itself, I just wanted to know how much it would cost, if it is an subscription and so on.
But it was not possible from the app store page itself. Have a look, how confusing it is:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@ndr/116483475865871622
It shows a lot of price points from 1€ all up to 45€ without saying if its a subscription or a one-time payment.
Maybe the author should include the pricing clearly somewhere else on the app store page as apple is not able to do so.
edit: spelling
For others curious like I was, it seems he hired a cartographer to render essentially a set of huge, nice-looking, custom map images with details like hiking trails that Apple Maps doesn't have.
So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.
The use of the cartographer to generate separate designs and the technology used to render/deliver those designs are two entirely separate concerns.
His original map provider offers both vector and raster tile services: https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/outdoors/
A common pattern is to use a vector tile service + style definition directly or to generate raster tiles if those are desired.
Good point, I assumed he was using images because his screenshots show text perfectly following the curves of rivers, which seems hard to do with dynamic rendering.
That’s the point of a vector (not raster) tiles. Wh do you say it is hard to do with dynamic rendering? With Maplibre or any modern map SDK this this is standard…
I think this may not even be possible because Apple does not give access to the Metal graphics API on Apple Watch to third-party developers.
Great evolution story. Also love seeing what can be achieved by stepping outside design lines, re. centred, symmetrical UIs. Makes me want an apple watch ;)
As an aside there's a screenshot in the article showing the Hidden Valley at Glen Coe, which happens to be one of my favourite short walks in Scotland.
A less happy aside of that aside is the house at the base of the valley. I used to look at it dreamily as we drove past, always closed up, nestled by itself in a remote nook between the mountains. What an extraordinary place it would be to live. The park for the hike was only a couple of hundred metres up the road. A few years later I recognised the house in a Louis Theroux doco, when he travelled there with its owner - TV personality Jimmy Saville. Wow. And then a few years later again, after I'd returned to Australia, it came out, posthumous, that Saville was one of the UK's most prolific child and sexual predators. Horrific stuff. The name and outline of the cottage structure can actually be seen at the top of the map in the screenshot.
In happier news, that house is being demolished: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gqqv17v1vo
I appreciate this comes from an outside perspective as I've not heard of this before, but "Pedometer++ 8" sounds like "Dissertation_final_final_v8.docx" to me.
It is just Pedometer++
The 8 is the version number that launched yesterday with this feature
As a pedometer++ user, it is amazing the attention to detail David has maintained over the years. The evolution is crazy.
He really is such a committed and dedicated developer. This here is of course a perfect example—"So… I commissioned a custom map" aka hiring a cartographer—but it was really cool how he blew up with Widgetsmith because he put in the effort with Watchsmith before, and was basically the world's expert on widgets? Couldn't happen to a better guy.
I have been using the app for years but literally just because I like the step counter widget. I had no idea it did all this! Will try it for sure. Cool read.
I’m interested since it’s clear this is a passionate and talented developer, but it seems the primary feature is step tracking, which iPhone already does by default. Is Pedometer++’s step counting somehow more accurate?
Yes, the primary feature that is being marketed is step tracking, but the app in general is much more than that. It's like how flighty just is a wrapper for the flights API that you could access through Google, yet flighty is the best app for flight tracking nonetheless and is a really cool app.
What I find curious is that the entire article seems to be framed in responding to the needs of a single user of the app — the author themselves.
Yet the app is published and has a great App Store review score of 4.8 with 170k+ reviews, and same score with 35k+ reviews for the Watch.
How does the author get feedback and respond to other customers? Or is this simply scratching one's own itch demonstrating its usefulness for others once again?
I spend a lot of time in wilderness areas that I don't know, and I simply pull my phone out of my pocket to see where I am. My watch measures my heart rate and that's it. While I have no doubt that pedometer++ is great and the work that went into it is impressive, I can't really see myself switching away from a big screen workflow to see exactly where I am. And I don't need to check where I am every 5 minutes. Typically only every 30 minutes or longer. Dunno, maybe I'm missing something :shrug:
Static tiles on a watch is the right call. Tried dynamic rendering on a constrained device once and pan/zoom got eaten by GC pauses every frame.
Apple Maps on WatchOS is pretty good but the usual routine is that I get on my bike with a route set and 3 minutes in the “are you working out?” screen takes over and I can’t see the maps without stopping to turn it off. Surely that screen should turn into a notification or silently record after some time without taking over the screen.
I’m surprised to hear people at Apple work on this because surely they must encounter this issue.
If this guys maps can somehow take the screen and hold it, I think he’s got a killer feature for me. Though I glanced at the App Store page and it wasn’t clear to me which features are subscription gated and which ones aren’t and I despise apps that won’t tell me till I’ve set everything up (it just feels so frustrating that it wasn’t clear ahead of time) so I’ll probably just endure and try to remember to start a workout manually so it won’t take over.
You can also turn off the "are you working out" feature. It's in the settings of the workout part. Just turn off "Check In Reminders"
Really enjoyed reading this. A lot. Reminds me when I was a teenager reading technical blogs in the earlier days of the internet.
BTW, that last line about hiring/commissioning a cartographer, very rad and cool :~)
While traveling in another country, I once forgot my iPhone passcode (don't ask, I'm autistic like that)
After a few retries it put me on a 2 hour timeout.
I had to get back to my room. I knew the way back on foot well enough, about 30 minutes away, but I wanted to take a look at the map anyway.
I thought I'd try it on my Apple Watch Ultra 3. It was a few months ago so it was the latest OS.
There were a few bugs in trying to do that simple task, like when typing out the name of a location the keyboard kept disappearing as if the UI was crashing or something.
I sighed, muttered a few curses at the state of things and the people in charge who let it get this way, and lowered my wrist and just enjoyed the stroll.
Like so many things in Apple software since the past 5 or so years, so much shit just doesn't work when you REALLY need it. F'n hell
Awesome work, truly. (But I'll stick with my Garmin.)
And it's a f:ing subscription delete
How do you expect the developers to pay for the service? Map tiles alone are already very expensive and data heavy.
This is just outsourcing the payment to donations...that may or may not arrive ("We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.").
[flagged]
Let's start by banning words like 'pediatric' instead, which directly reference children and are thus more related to pedophiles. We can just call people 'doctor/dentist for small people'.
We really can't afford to keep blacklisting words for reasons that have no basis in reality. We're gonna run out of words.
(parent edited their comment - the suggestion was that "pedometer" is a bad name because of the first four letters being reminiscent of pedophiles and Epstein)