Google's 'News & Weather' Apple Watch App Has 'Fail' Written All Over It

Apple Watch apps are typically pretty good at being unique, but offering up an experience that's both familiar and approachable. Some go a bit above and beyond the call of app duty, making Apple Watch features that stand out. Google isn't one of them. Today, the largest conduit of information on Earth updated their News & Weather iOS app to support Apple Watch, and it's not good. It's barely passable, really. Compared to other apps that offer similar info, Google's News & Weather falls well short of being exciting, much less interesting.

What Google brought was a really basic Apple Watch workaround. On your wrist, you'll see text and maybe a header image culled from 'Top Stories'. That's it. The app is not unique, or even very engaging. You see headlines, and can save articles to Safari's reading list with Force Touch.

Reading on the small screen is not ideal, obviously, but Google seems to have given up halfway through making an Apple Watch app, here. Compared to Yahoo, who have a really unique take on news snippets via the wrist-worn Apple Watch, Google just plain fails.

We can hope this is just a toe-dip into waters outside of Android Wear for Google. They've typically made some really nice iOS experiences, and have ported their own design language nicely to iOS apps.

If you don't want to do more than look at your wrist and say "oh" as you scroll through glances, Google News & Weather is a good app to have. Otherwise, it's oddly disjointed and plain.

Source: App Store