If you’re an Apple Watch early adopter you’ve probably been looking forward to today, which was the planned launch day of WatchOS 2. Those hopes were crushed by Apple this morning when the company officially delayed the launch of the new wearable software thanks to an unforeseen hurdle in its development.
“We have discovered a bug in development of WatchOS 2 that is taking a bit longer to fix than we expected,” the company said in an uncharacteristically casual statement. “We will not release WatchOS 2 today but will shortly.”
Apple, and large tech companies in general, typically avoid words like “bug” when talking about their own software, even when having to explain a last-minute delay. I’ve personally been using each new iteration of the WatchOS 2 beta software on my Apple Watch as each one has rolled out, and aside from some pretty serious battery life issues early on—which I’m happy to say have been ironed out—my Watch has performed perfectly fine throughout.
The fact that there was no warning until the morning of the scheduled launch suggests an issue that, for one reason or another, wasn’t spotted during the extensive beta testing process. That doesn’t exactly narrow down the potential culprits, but a compatibility issue between WatchOS 2 and iOS 9, which is just being rolled out today, might have slipped under the radar.
Regardless of the reason, the delayed rollout of the new Apple Watch software isn’t great news for Apple’s wearable ambitions. The company has already noted that the watch sold above their own expectations, but with smartwatches as a whole still struggling to be taken seriously, delays are never good news.
Photo via raneko/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)