Early Enthusiasm About Apple Watch Dials Back on Social Media
Nearly eight months after Tim Cook took the wraps off the Apple Watch to the eager delight of the Apple faithful, sentiment on the first-generation device has waned a bit, said crowdsourcing service CrowdFlower. In September, 74 percent of women tweeting about the Apple Watch and 56 percent of men wanted to buy the device, said CrowdFlower.
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Since the watch began shipping April 24, “things shade a bit darker,” said CrowdFlower, which analyzed 30,000 individual tweets on Twitter about the Apple Watch since launch. Sentiment toward the Watch is still “overall positive,” said the company Monday, “but it’s nowhere near the giddy highs” of last fall. Women exhibit a 10 percent more positive attitude -- and 10 percent less negative -- view of the watch than men, who have a 55 percent positive sentiment toward the wearable. "We went from a majority of Twitter users wanting to buy the thing to a slim majority feeling positive about it at all," said CrowdFlower. Seventy percent of tweets about the Watch were from men, regardless of opinion, notable since there are 1.6 million more female users on Twitter than males, said CrowdFlower.
More than half of the positive view toward the watch related to apps, said the researcher, which cited fitness app accuracy and the ability to use watches to present boarding passes and buy coffee as highly touted plusses on Twitter. On the negative side, app performance and selection ranked the biggest complaint in tweets among Apple Watch users post-launch.
A New York Apple Watch owner we followed on Facebook represented early enthusiasm for the smart wristband gone sour. In a May 2 Facebook post, the early adopter and mother said, “I've had the Apple Watch almost a week and will be returning it Monday. It's a nifty device, but it's very 1.0, and doesn't yet do anything I find indispensable. If it was less bulky and replaced my regular watch, I would likely keep it just to ping my misplaced phone, have my calendar handy, and for a stealthy vibrate when I get an important text.” Taking a call with the Watch was “cool,” she said, along with being able to pause TV and answer a text from the wrist. Bottom line, though, she said, “It's another expensive device to charge, maintain and manage.”
Meanwhile, Yahoo said Thursday its Flurry Analytics service is making it possible for developers to understand how users interact with their apps on the tiny Apple Watch display. Using the free Flurry iOS software developer kit, developers will be able to track new users, active users and the actions of their Watch users with custom events, said Yahoo. They will also be able to see how usage balances out between the Apple Watch apps and companion apps on the user's iPhone, Yahoo said.
In the fledgling wearables category, many developers are experimenting with strategies for building successful Apple Watch apps, said Brad Jones, Flurry director-product management. The Apple Watch “is shifting the way the industry thinks about app creation,” said Jones, saying understanding user behavior is “crucial for success.”