Apple has released iOS 8. 2 which includes support for WatchKit and the Apple Watch. While testing can be performed now on the simulator, testing of your app with actual devices will be crucial to ensure your App behaves correctly with Apple Watch’s. In this article we will explore some of the development opportunities, challenges and QA aspects of developing for Apple Watch and iOS 8. 2. WatchKit is the interface that allows your App to send, receive and display data on the watch. None of your code is actually running on the watch itself initially because of battery life considerations. Instead, you will run an iOS 8 WatchKit extension inside your iPhone app bundle which will tell WatchKit what to display on the Watch. iOS then talks to the Watch to create your views. WatchKit will receive actions from the watch so that your extension can act on them. Full WatchKit apps can have 1 or more views with text, images (including setting up multiple images as a animation), tables, buttons, sliders, switches, and force touch menus. Functionality testing is similar to mobile apps except that interactions are only doing touches and using dictation for text entry, no keyboards, pinch zooming or rotation. Also there are different screen resolutions for each watch size, so you will need to code for both. To preserve battery life and to accommodate the smaller display, Watch Apps should only focus on core simple functions that a user needs from your app. If your app has complex user functions, we recommend passing those on (using handoff) or keeping them to your iOS App where you have more screen space battery life. If you do have to run complex processing tasks in the background on your iOS device in order for your Watch App to work, such as internet communications, please keep this as brief as possible. Watch Apps are terminated if the app leaves the display or the device goes to sleep, so your iOS extension/app needs to be ready in case of a sudden termination by saving state or canceling network activity. Keep updating the UI on the watch to a minimum, as each update you do has an energy cost. Tell them what you are gaining from the experience, but do not say you have taken this step because you are concerned about your low verbal score or substandard flip through this site grades. We also recommend including all resources and asset files that will always be needed for the Watch App inside the extension bundle. If you have to download images off the internet, you can cache some of this on the watch app to reduce energy cost with wireless communications. All iOS applications, even those that do not use WatchKit, will be able to send Push Notifications to Apple Watches if the user enables your app to do so. We recommend that if you use Push or Local notifications that tests be performed (while the phone is asleep and the app is opted into Watch Notifications) that your notifications display properly, and that your iPhone app launches/resumes correctly when an action button is pressed for the notification on the watch. If you want to fully integrate with Apple Watch for your notifications, we highly recommend adopting the new classes in the Notifications API and in WatchKit which allow you to add additional actions that either launch your Watch App or passes the action to your iOS app, a custom background, and images. Because of limited battery life and how quickly a user may need to read information, custom notifications should only contain as much info as is needed to be displayed without having to open the Watch App or iOS App. Glances allow you to display brief content that your user can see without having to open your app. You are only afforded 1 view here, so only display what is most relevant to that user for quick looks in the timeliest way possible. No interactivity is allowed in glances with the exception of a tap on the glance to launch your Watch App to a specific view based on your glance. Since this is the only part of your app that can update in the background, we recommend testing glances over periods of time to ensure they update as expected.