Running a Tesla With an Apple Watch

ELEKS management announced:

A couple of days, gallons of coffee and hours of restless peering into monitors later, we developed our first Apple Watch app that allows controlling the Tesla Model S electric car via the Internet using web-service API. The app perfectly lines up with the concept of smart watches, lets the user access critical information about the car and allows managing it quickly without wasting time on taking out and unlocking the phone.

The new product may seem exciting, until ELEKS describes all the hurdles to get to a finished product. In a blog post, Markiyan Matsekh, ELEKS Product Manager, Mobility & Wearables, writes:

… Apple Watch without an iPhone is actually nothing more than a useless toy. And although Apple mentioned WatchKit Apps — full-featured applications that, in theory, should work without an iPhone, this kind of applications aren’t available yet and no one knows when they will be. On the other hand, this significant drawback is, surprisingly, a big plus. Since the smart watch application is carried out on the iPhone, all the functionality and data from the iPhone is available for the developer (though Apple has already warned us about possible restrictions on energy-intensive operations). WatchKit is kind of a “bridge” linking code on an iPhone with Apple Watch interface.

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Additionally:

And now for the bad news. I mean the functions that are not available to the developers:

• The smart watch has an accelerometer and a gyroscope but when developing, you have no access to them.
• There is Bluetooth but it can only connect to your iPhone and it’s also not available for developers.
• Apple watch display is touch sensitive but if you’re developing, only Force Touch, which is used to display the shortcut menu, is available to you.
• The system of tactile notifications TapTic Engine is, unfortunately, also unavailable.
• You also don’t have access to the built-in speaker and microphone.
• It kind of has GPS but only on your iPhone.

It was exciting news, until reading the fine print.

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