Sunday, January 18th, 2015

The Apple Watch is designed for three primary functions: timekeeping, communication, and fitness tracking. But if you go for a run with just the Apple Watch and no iPhone, one of those three functions, communication, no longer works. Short of building in a cellular receiver on the Watch, what could Apple do to allow for communication on the device?

One idea would be to use Apple’s own Multipeer Connectivity framework which allows for peer-to-peer connections between devices over WiFi and Bluetooth. The most well-known app that uses this functionality (also known as mesh networking) is Firechat, a chat app launched in March 2014 that has already been used in protest movements (a good primer on mesh networks can be found here). By not being centralized, mesh networking’s distributed communication model can avoid being shutdown in the event of political repression or a widespread power outage.

With the Multipeer Connectivity framework already in place on devices running iOS 7 or newer, it’s not much of a leap to imagine how, for example, encrypted iMessages could be routed through other devices once the Apple Watch detects their presence nearby (FireChat has a range of 200 feet, to give an idea of what “nearby” might mean). All you would need to do in order to communicate while running without your iPhone is to pass by someone with an iOS device and stay within range long enough for the devices to communicate with each other.

We don’t yet know the full feature set of the Apple Watch, but the hardware and software in the iOS ecosystem is in place to enable this type of functionality. We’ll see what the first generation of the Apple Watch brings soon enough, but this might be a good alternative for maintaining communication until there’s enough battery power in the device to sustain a cellular connection.

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