Instagram Removes Watch App
In a move that surprises almost no one, Instagram opted to ditch its Watch app entirely rather than dedicated it engineering resources to ‘modernise’ it. I expect this will be the path many developers pick, continuing the exodus of Watch apps from the store, a trend that we’ve seen for the better part of a year at this point.
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Another facet to this story that people don’t really talk about is that you need a Watch app to offer custom Apple Watch notification interfaces for your app. The notification controller is embedded inside the Watch app binary, so if you don’t have a Watch app, you can’t provide Watch users with custom-designed alerts. This means that along with the Instagram Watch app, Watch users also lose the pretty Instagram notifications.
Previously: Major Apps Abandoning Apple Watch, WatchKit Is a Sweet Solution.
Update (2018-06-05): Juli Clover:
Lyft is the latest company to ditch support for the Apple Watch, eliminating its Apple Watch app in an update that was released this morning.
Update (2018-08-06): Christian Zibreg:
The app’s developer has removed the watchOS component from Instapaper’s most recent update on App Store, which basically killed all Apple Watch functionality. That’s quite a shame given Instapaper was one of the better Apple Watch apps out there: it allowed you to access text-to-speech playback of saved articles, as well as like, delete or archive individual items.
