Last week, Wearable App Review, the first website solely focused on the apps that fuel wearable technology, announced their wearable app annual winners. They compiled the best of the best in all aspects of wearable technology including glasses, watches, fitness bands and other sensors/monitors. If it’s wearable and it has an app, they’ve looked at it.
Wearable tech is set for an explosion over the next year and hardware like Google Glass, Pebble Watch and even Fitbit are sitting on the forefront of that eruption.
What seems to set apart different wearable devices is their relationship with the developer community. Aside from Google Glass, most wearable technology companies are themselves very small and their relying on developers to embrace the technology and create apps for it. Pebble is a great example, their developer community has already created thousands of watch faces and mini apps that can be used with the popular smart watch.
“Just like the smartphone space, it will be up to the developer community to build applications for wearable devices to really show their value. This is why releasing an SDK to the developer community is entirely essential to the success of any wearable device. The apps that we chose in our first end-of-year awards are the perfect example of what happens when great hardware is brought to life with some fantastic app ideas.” Tom Emrich, Co-Founder of Wearable App Review said in a statement.
After reviewing hundreds of apps across a variety of wearable devices, these are the apps that won their first awards:
- Google Glass: Word Lens (augmented reality translation app)
- Pebble: Music Boss for Pebble (control any Android music app with your Pebble)
- Samsung Galaxy Gear: Watch Styler (design and create your own watchfaces for Gear)
- Sony Smartwatch: Watcher – Smartphone Camera (remotely access your smartphone camera with your smartwatch)
- Jawbone UP: IFTTT (create recipes to like sending activity straight to social networks)
- Fitbit: MapMyRun (sync your Fitbit to your MapMyRun account)
To visualize where the wearable app space is going, they also released this infographic:
