As much as patent and trade-dress lawsuits would like to stop it, getting to today's idea of a modern, mature smartphone was a collaborative effort. Apple laid the foundation with the first iPhone, which popularized the idea of a finger-driven all-screen device with an on-screen keyboard and later added an app store. Google later came up with now-standard functionality like a pull-down notification panel, voice input, and a heavy cloud component. Even Samsung helped out by giving the world the phablet and leading the charge toward larger screen sizes—today even Apple makes a 5.5-inch phone.

Smartwatches will be a collaborative effort, too. Every new product advances the conversation of what these tiny wrist computers should be, and yesterday Apple gave a long, impassioned speech on the matter.

And it was mostly stuff Android Wear did already.

At least, the feature set mostly matched Android Wear. Feature sets aren't what make a device, though. The biggest change Apple is bringing to the smartwatch is its approach to apps. Consider how Android Wear is designed: it's a notification machine. On Wear you're always looking at a stack of notifications that come to you, rarely do you go and launch an app. When you run out of notifications, the screen is just blank—it becomes a regular watch, suggesting that when you run out of notifications, you're pretty much done with your wrist computer.

There are apps in Android Wear, but they live buried down in a ghetto called the "Start" menu. To get there you have to tap on the main screen, scroll all the way to the bottom of the list, pick "start" and there you'll see your list of apps. You can activate apps via voice by saying "Ok Google start [app name]," but apps don't get to add actions to the voice menu. Apps are totally secondary to the built-in functions of Wear.

Compare that to the Apple Watch, which has app icons right on the home screen—press the crown and it pops up. If you make an Android Wear app you'll be buried in the "Start" ghetto, but on the Apple Watch you'll have a front row seat. The Apple Watch encourages developers to experiment and make apps for it, while on Android Wear developers are encouraged to color within Google's lines—it's an important distinction. Android Wear is notification-centric—Google makes the interface, and developers can plug their data into it. Apple though, is app-centric. Developers make their own UI, come up with new ideas, and build apps that the user will see and access. Besides standalone apps, the Apple Watch has a timeline of sorts called "Glances" that developers can add cards to—just a quick swipe up from the bottom of the screen and you can scroll through cards. It's a non-notification-based way to surface app content to users, where Android Wear displays incoming notifications and that's it.

At the beginning of this article we mentioned the smartphone contributions from Apple, Google, and Samsung, but app developers came up with countless innovations that were later adopted by everyone. One of the first modern app stores was actually "Installer.app," an iOS store for jailbroken apps—Apple adopted the idea for iOS 2. Swype came up with the idea of a gesture-based typing system, where you move your finger from key to key without lifting. The feature is now standard on Android and Windows Phone.

Since no one is quite sure what our little wrist computers should do, this kind of experimentation is vital for nailing down good smartwatch use cases. Right now it's the Wild West and experimentation is important. While Apple offers everyone (relatively speaking) a spot on the main interface, Google doesn't seem too keen on developers messing with its watch platform. Google doesn't want to repeat the mistakes of smartphone Android, which is a free-for-all of OEM modification, but we think it has swung too far in the other direction. You'll see more app developers and more experimentation on the Apple Watch.

Wi-Fi support makes the Apple Watch useful at home

The other big addition in the Apple Watch is support for Wi-Fi. Both Wear and the Apple Watch use a phone's Bluetooth connection for Internet access, but the Apple Watch has an option to switch to Wi-Fi when you're at home. With its Bluetooth-only limitation, Android Wear is only really useful when you're on the go, because then you have your phone in your pocket. At home, if you leave your phone on the couch and walk into the kitchen, you've probably walked out of Bluetooth range and your Android Wear device will stop working.

With Wi-Fi, an Apple Watch will be useful in the entire house. You won't have to haul your smartphone around just to get an Internet connection. If my Android Wear device had Wi-Fi, I'd end up wearing it a lot more than I do now.

Like we said in the beginning, the smartwatch will be a collaborative effort. We fully expect Google to snatch up every good idea here and come out with some of its own that Apple will in turn use in the next version. And sure enough, one day after the Apple Watch announcement, a report from The Verge says that Android Wear will soon get Wi-Fi support. Everyone takes ideas from everyone else, and we get better products for it.