Since Apple’s release of WatchKit yesterday, developers of all stripes have been digging through the SDK, trying to get a sense of what you can and can’t do. There’s a gold rush feel to it all, mirroring (in a much smaller way, perhaps) the excitement that surrounded the release of the original iPhone SDK.
Part of the analysis centers on the question of the OS at the center of Apple Watch. There’s some conjecture that Apple Watch runs iOS because the WatchKit UI elements are subclasses of UIKit classes. On one hand, reuse of elements of the UIKit framework isn’t the same thing (to me at least) as running the same OS.
On the other hand, it’s certainly not an unreasonable conjecture.
Good post by Jake Marsh, pulling all this together.
That’s not a logical conjecture to make, because those subclasses and that code run on the iPhone. Using UIKit subclasses in an Apple Watch extension makes sense since the code is being run within iOS, extending an app that is already based on UIKit. It implies exactly nothing about the OS on the Watch itself.