Fitness is an early-adopter market too. It's worked better because fitness nuts are incredibly passionate early adopters - build something that appeals to them and you get rapid uptake. But they're still quite limited in number, and that's eventually going to prove problematic for hardware startups that target them, at least if they're funded and burn cash as if they're a mainstream product. We saw Go-Pro hit the wall in mid-2015; Fitbit is next.
I own both an Apple Watch and a Moto 360, and I was really hoping to see the smartwatch market take off - enough that I wasted a year or so on app development for it. IMHO, the problem is that the "whole product" isn't there yet. I think the killer apps for smartwatches will actually be in logistics: replace managers & foremen with software, which interfaces with the line workers via smartwatch. The beauty of a smartwatch in this situation is that you can be doing other stuff with your hands, which you can't do with a phone. Imagine, for example, a retail store with no employees, where you walk in and your watch guides you to the items of interest, displays prices as you try out items, and then lets you check-out by tapping your wristwatch and having it instantly charge your credit card. Or a restaurant where the waiters know instantly when a table is waiting, and never mess up an order.
But that isn't a smartwatch app, that's a complete value chain, and building out the customer relationships and back-end software is non-trivial, probably the majority of the work. Nobody's done it yet, and probably nobody's going to do it until you get a critical mass of customers with smartwatches, so there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Most people are terrible at communicating with other people. Hell, I suspect that pretty much all of the appeal of the gig economy (from the worker side) is that you don't need to deal with a boss.
I own both an Apple Watch and a Moto 360, and I was really hoping to see the smartwatch market take off - enough that I wasted a year or so on app development for it. IMHO, the problem is that the "whole product" isn't there yet. I think the killer apps for smartwatches will actually be in logistics: replace managers & foremen with software, which interfaces with the line workers via smartwatch. The beauty of a smartwatch in this situation is that you can be doing other stuff with your hands, which you can't do with a phone. Imagine, for example, a retail store with no employees, where you walk in and your watch guides you to the items of interest, displays prices as you try out items, and then lets you check-out by tapping your wristwatch and having it instantly charge your credit card. Or a restaurant where the waiters know instantly when a table is waiting, and never mess up an order.
But that isn't a smartwatch app, that's a complete value chain, and building out the customer relationships and back-end software is non-trivial, probably the majority of the work. Nobody's done it yet, and probably nobody's going to do it until you get a critical mass of customers with smartwatches, so there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.