Yeah, OP&#x27;s claims about battery life are manifestly silly. The HN headline makes it sound like the article is making claims about the Watch in general, but it isn&#x27;t, just that one dev&#x27;s app.<p>I understand and take your point about public APIs lagging behind private ones, but in this case it&#x27;s not that the public SDK is lagging, it&#x27;s a <i>totally different beast</i>.<p>The fundamental execution model is the same as watchos 1 -- you don&#x27;t get to write code that runs in the app process, you write code that runs in a separate extension process and get to twiddle ui elements in the main process using a very limited API.<p>Which is why if you&#x27;re trying to do anything dynamic, you have to resort to generating and beaming over images.<p>Besides this fundamental limitation, the management of app process vs extension process vs network daemons is still buggy (contributed to, probably, by the fact that apple isn&#x27;t dogfooding), which means it&#x27;s hard to impossible to make your app stable. I think this has been a huge contributor the general perception that 3rd party Watch apps are slow and buggy.<p>Obviously, I can only speculate about Apple&#x27;s motives for going with WatchKit vs exposing native development, as on the iPhone.<p>My guess is they were very worried about an initial public perception of the watch being &quot;battery life sucks,&quot; so they didn&#x27;t want to open up 3rd party code to run on the Watch. Hence WatchKit and OS1.<p><i>Then</i> there was a huge public negative perception about not having native apps, so they rushed out OS2, which has &#x27;native&#x27; apps, but still following the (now nonsensical) 2-process model of WatchKit.<p>I do hope Apple opens up true native dev on the watch at some point.<p>It won&#x27;t be &quot;the public SDK getting more powerful over time,&quot; though, it will be making a qualitative change to the SDK itself.<p>P.S. If you haven&#x27;t and are curious, I encourage you to take a look at WatchKit. I think you will be surprised at how limited it is.<p>P.P.S. I think Apple may have been better served by doing something akin to  the original iPhone model -- just saying, &quot;no 3rd party apps yet, but it&#x27;s coming,&quot; rather than having a half-assed SDK on day 1.