Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Removing “Send to Watch”

I’ve spent many months of development on Overcast’s Apple Watch app, especially implementing standalone “Send to Watch” playback. Unfortunately, I now need to remove the “Send to Watch” feature.

I’m sorry to the people who used it. While there weren’t many of you (about 0.1% of active users), I’ve heard from some who it meant quite a bit to.

In retrospect, “Send to Watch” wasn’t good enough to ship. I’ve paid for that in a constant stream of negative App Store reviews that have reduced the entire app’s average, but that alone wouldn’t sink the feature. Here’s what happened.

Many people had been asking for standalone playback since the first Apple Watch was released. I spent months of development on it last winter, but I simply wasn’t able to get a minimum acceptable quality level out of the limited watchOS audio APIs.

I shelved the feature until other Apple Watch podcast apps revealed a workaround that made background audio much more usable on watchOS, so I decided to use the same technique and ship the feature anyway, despite its other shortcomings. That was a mistake.

That workaround doesn’t work anymore in watchOS 4. Rewriting “Send to Watch” playback to use the only supported alternative would likely take at least another month of development and testing that I currently can’t spare, and due to its limitations, the resulting usability and experience wouldn’t be good enough for me to confidently ship.1

Therefore, I’ve decided to remove “Send to Watch” in the latest update today, a bit ahead of watchOS 4’s expected release, before anyone else gets accustomed to it.

I intend to continue supporting and updating the Watch app as a convenient, lightweight, fast remote control for iPhone playback. But it’s not possible to ship a good standalone podcast player on watchOS today, and it’ll probably take a few more years of hardware and software evolution before that changes.

There isn’t much time left before iOS 11’s release, and I need to spend the rest of the summer working on highly requested features and updates in the main app.

I’m sorry again for the loss of this feature to the people who used it. If it becomes possible in the future to do it right, I’ll do my best to bring it back.

  1. watchOS normally doesn’t let apps run continuously in the background, even if they’re playing audio, unlike iOS. The WKAudioFilePlayer API lets your app hand off a file or playlist to the system for playback, and then try to figure out what happened with it next time your app launches (to know whether the user listened to a certain time, reached the end, skipped to the next episode, etc.). Unfortunately, it has major shortcomings, bugs, and non-ideal behaviors for making a usable podcast app.

    The loophole was to declare the app as a workout-monitoring app, which let it run continuously in the background on watchOS 3 if a workout was active — or, for some reason, if it was playing audio. This let me use the much better AVAudioPlayer to build a usable podcast player on the Watch.

    In watchOS 4, that loophole no longer enables background audio playback, so any audio APIs other than WKAudioFilePlayer pause as soon as the foreground app changes or the Watch display sleeps. ↩︎

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