Minor data point about app discovery:

I've got an open-source free Wear OS watchface that I've noodled on for the past few years. It smears your calendar free/busy time around the next 12 hours of your watchface. Very handy.

Around last December, I set out to port it to work properly with Wear OS 2.x, which of course doesn't support original Wear 1.x apps (because reasons), and my original app had thusly been unceremonious removed from the store. Here's a trace of the number of installed users of the new app, which I posted with a new name (CalWatch2 rather than CalWatch).



What you'll see is a growth spurt starting in April and firmly ending by July. Why? I have no idea. I answered a handful of relevant questions on Reddit and pointed people at my app. Did that drive the users? Was it tweaks I made to the content description or app name? No idea.

I'm kinda tempted to pay for advertising to Android users, just to see if anything useful comes of it.

And, of course, I suppose I cannot leave a post like this here without the links for installation (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dwallach.calwatch2) or the source code (https://github.com/danwallach/CalWatch).

Sigh.

Serious digressing post script: Current Wear OS hardware isn't particularly exciting, and the software platform is evolving at a snail's pace. Six months ago, I got myself a Garmin Fenix 5S+, because it does what I need for biking and other athletic things. But it's also a remarkably capable watch with a week of battery life if you don't use the GPS tracking. The only downside is that programming it seems to be an exercise in awful. Some details for the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOSDev/comments/b6k2ow/has_anybody_looked_at_garmin_monkey_c/