Our Apple Watch app stole the show
Endel keeps making history! First to bring real-time soundscape generation to your wrist, and now first ever to receive the Apple Watch App of the Year award.
From Apple's announcement:
Apple today presented its App Store Best of 2020 winners, recognizing 15 apps and games that proved to be essential for making life easier, healthier, and more connected this year. Notable for their high quality, creative design, usability, and innovative technology, these apps and games are equally celebrated for their positive cultural impact, helpfulness, and importance.
“This year, more than ever before, some of our most creative and connected moments happened in apps. This was thanks to the amazing work of developers who introduced fresh, helpful app experiences throughout the year,” said Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow. “Around the world, we saw remarkable efforts from so many developers, and these Best of 2020 winners are 15 outstanding examples of that innovation. From helping us stay fit and mindful, to keeping our children’s education on track, to helping fight hunger, their impact was meaningful to so many of us.”
Read a firsthand account from Slava Dubovitsky, Endel Apple Platforms Lead Developer:
The main idea behind Endel is to generate soundscapes on the fly, personalized using data from the user’s environment, such as heart rate, weather, motion, etc. All on a device with no internet connection required. The system relies heavily on platform APIs for data collection and sound processing; that's why the first versions of our watchOS app were more or less a remote control for the full-featured iOS app.
Things have changed significantly after WWDC'19 introduced key improvements to their Audio Unit, which—coupled with the first versions of SwiftUI & Combine—encouraged us to bring as much of the full Endel experience to the Apple Watch as possible.
We started with Xcode betas. While the core tech team investigated ways to run the audio subsystem, our front-end team has been immersed in Combine & SwiftUI, and I'd like to thank Majid Jabrayilov, Paul Hudson, and Donny Wals for all the great tips they provided along the way.
The result was even better than expected. Not only have we integrated most of our systems into the Apple Watch app, but battery drain has also been kept to a minimum—even fully packed with complex SwiftUI animations and graphics.
After the September'19 release, we're still putting in a lot of work under the hood. For instance, we wrapped the entire WatchConnect into a network of reactive operators, and now we can reuse whole Services between iOS and watchOS targets without any additional logic changes.
So, thanks a lot for the kind words I'm receiving today y’all! I genuinely believe there will be way more big moments for this incredible team.