I’ve been keeping an eye on the adoption of the Apple Watch Series 3 since its introduction last fall. From a development perspective the Series 3 is a delight to work with. It is fast, capable and LTE allows a wide variety of new applications (for example, the podcast support I added to Workouts++).

This stands in contrast to the challenges of working with the Series 0 (or Apple Watch (1st generation) as Apple would call it). It is just slow and honestly a bit painful to develop for. Even basic things like deploying your application to the watch can take uncomfortably long amounts of time. In daily use the Series 0 is probably “good enough” for many customers, especially with the speed/stability improvements added in watchOS 4, but as a developer I can’t wait until I no longer have to support it.

Which is why I’ve been watching the Apple Watch adoption curve within my apps (specifically Pedometer++ for this analysis) quite carefully. My personal hope is that this summer when we get watchOS 5 it will drop support for the Series 0 and free Apple to really push forward on what is possible for developers. But in order for that wish to be realistic I imagine Apple will need the daily use of those first watches to have died down significantly.

It seems like recently Apple has been more reticent to drop support for old hardware, but I hope that the pattern that we saw with the iPad might be repeated here. Where the first generation of the product was more quickly deprecated (2.5 years later in the case of the 1st Gen iPad). After that short lifespan for the first version, they then kept the second generation, iPad 2, supported for 5 years. The Series 1 & Series 2 watches would be a great baseline going forward. While not quite so fast as the Series 3, they are a mile ahead of the Series 0.

So far the data is looking promising that this dream of mine might actually be possible. The Series 3 is being adopted incredibly quickly and just last week became the most popular Apple Watch overall amongst my users with 33% of the overall user-base. The Series 0 is steadily falling, currently at around 24%.

I don’t know how low Apple would feel comfortable cutting off support for the Series 0, but it certainly seems like it is a possibility.

If I do some completely unscientific, wild, and almost certainly unreliable extrapolations of the current adoption trends (straight linear projection based on the trends since Christmas). It looks like by this fall, when presumably the next Apple Watch would be released and watchOS 5 will be generally available, the Series 0 may be as low as 15-20%.

I really do hope that they pursue this path. While as a consumer I know how bad it feels when something I use gets deprecated, as a developer I would love to see this platform be aggressively pushed forward.

A few random other notes that I’ve seen in my statistics with the Apple Watch: