Google has finally rolled out its first app for the Apple Watch which is an update to its Google News & Weather for iOS app.
While other third-party developers had immediately jumped at the opportunity of releasing their apps for Apple’s major product in five years, Google had been keeping mum until now.
A report on Tech Crunch notes that while a Google Maps for Apple Watch would have got more whistles, the weather app is nonetheless a good start and points to a promising series of Apple smartwatch versions of its popular apps.
The Google News & Weather app is new to iOS as well as it was released on the closed-source platform only last fall. The app offers news summaries from 65,000 publications, with headlines grouped into categories like ‘Technology,’ ‘Sports,’ or ‘Fashion,’ for example. Users can also customize the stream of news and weather information based on their section and area of interest.
Its version for the Apple Watch offers users the ability to swipe through the top headlines from the watch’s small screen. You can browse through the dozen headlines horizontally and scroll down to see an accompanying photo for each story.
However, unlike other news apps like The New York Times’ app, the Google app won’t show the complete story or even a summary of it on the small screen of Apple Watch. It also doesn’t support Handoff to allow you to continue reading the story on your iPhone, but allows you to save it to Safari’s Reading List by way of Force Touch. Sadly, the app doesn’t even offer weather alerts, which makes it appear like a reluctant update given to the app by Google.
