Any plans for improving app launch experience for larger collections / allowing launchers?

Watchapp/Face Developers Corner
1

PT2 just joined the original KS bunch 2 days ago, really delighted, kudos for getting the perfect thing back/out :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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One little gripe I have is that… there are lots of good apps, and loading them from the watch itself is a bit of a pain to scroll possibly 20-30 lines down.

It would be nice to be able to have a launcher that combines buttons and touch to e.g use the buttons to switch between 9?12?16?-app pages, then tap on the app you want to launch for much quicker access to more than what you can do with quick launch button presses.

IMO it would be ideal if the SDK could expose a list of installed apps with a way to retrieve their name/icons/order in the stock list and launch them so that we could develop alternate launchers. That launcher would just be a “normal” app you can assign as Quick Launch, but which has the ability to present the installed apps in whatever way is deemed appropriate and launch it.

2

Exposing a list of installed apps (Name, Icon, [Order], [Glance String]) would be a great addition to the SDK, and would translate well into a “complications API” allowing watchfaces to also be launchers.

3

Agreed, I’m very much wanting this too, to create my own launcher!!!

The API to retrieve the list of installed apps should definitely include their name, icon and UUID.

The API to execute a certain app should be available too.

The phone should be able to retrieve the list (with icons) too. That way setup of launchers can be made on the phone, but pure executing (starting) the app should be without any help of the phone.