Making Truly Native Native Apps on Apple Watch

Just wanted to add a bit of commentary to Steven’s awesome writeup on the UIKit hax we did with Apple Watch… :D

WatchKit apps are handcuffed, as it were, only able to display UI through the elements WatchKit provides. They cannot get the position of touches onscreen, or use swipe gestures, or multitouch.

Seriously, it’s horrible. Being able to build proper apps would be so great, instead of simple ways to display JSON files with Interface Builder (yes, that’s basically what WatchKit currently is). Especially watch faces, I’d love to be able to build my own (even powered by Sprite Kit, I know the stock ones use it!), I’ve got so many ideas for things to build.

Humanizing LLDB

I roped @b3ll into a torturous day & night of testing things, he in a cafe across from WWDC (with @saurik for much-needed moral support!), me across the Atlantic.

10/10, can confirm, working as a remote, human, lldb / gdb session over iMessage was really weird. I’m pretty sure I have 30+ zipped up attempted builds, all of which had more and more aggressive naming schemes as time progressed :P (fku.zip). Sometimes the apps would install, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d insta-crash, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d just insta-crash Carousel.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

PS: Here’s a visual representation of how debugging went.

:/

:(

:D

Specs Pls

After getting a basic UIKit app going, we started trying out various other iOS projects to see how they’d scale (scale… hehe… the watch is tiny… geddit?).

PepperUICore classes are prefixed PUIC and are mostly subclasses of UIKit classes. Your root UIApplication subclass should be PUICApplication.

While messing about with PepperCore, we whipped up an app to report the specs although whenever we tried to query the CPU speed it blew up. It’s got a really weird CPU(s?). Still… that’s a lot of RAM for a tiny watch!

Doomed Betas

Next I tried porting Doom to the Apple Watch, since that’d be well, totally really super awesome. Doom is the most ported game of all time and it runs on calculators, so surely it must work on the Apple Watch, right?

watchOS can be so incredibly fickle when installing binaries. I’ve seen this with non-hacked regular WatchKit apps too, but you can get into a state where the OS refuses to install a binary and gives you random error messages. Sometimes rebooting fixes this, sometimes removing the app from your phone helps. Sometimes the exact same binary won’t install one minute, and works the next.

I actually had it compiling and running at one point, but the fact that the builds were like 30mb made it excruciatingly painful to install and debug (transferring 30mb wirelessly took like 30 minutes). It also didn’t get very far, sadly. It was crashing on some weird and random OpenGL bugs, which I just blamed on the buggy 2.0 beta 1 software. What was even more “fun” was when I’d actually try and use the watch normally by raising my wrist, you know to check the time, and then seeing as it would just deadlock itself.

Yes… yes… I know… “Friends don’t let friends install iOS betas.” -@mxweas

Nano Canabalt

What didn’t help was I had no debugging session to attach to, nor did I have any crashlogs (Steven says they take an hour… um no, more like a day ;P). To make things easier I migrated to a slightly smaller and more manageable codebase, Canabalt! Cramming everything to fit onscreen and make it playable took some messing about, but eventually it worked pretty great. Sound, controls, 60fps, the whole deal (the soundtrack is fantastic btw). Not quite sure how quickly it would drain the battery, but it seemed okay!

Closing Notes

Working on this and keeping it somewhat secret was super fun, and a challenge at times, but now that it’s out in the open, make some cool stuff! If you do make anything cool, feel free to give me or @stroughtonsmith a shout! :D

watchOS is iOS; most of the frameworks you expect to be there are actually on-disk. However, the SDK will not include them, or have complete headers for them.

It’s so true. Everything “just works”, well, within reason. Once you’ve got ramped up and things working, do give it a shot at some point!

I know my Click Wheel Keyboard is just begging for an Apple Watch port… Digital Click Wheel Crown anyone? :D