Today marks an exciting milestone for ETA. While only a point release overall, it represents the third major version of ETA for Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch is a key platform for ETA and we’re thrilled to see so many active and happy users. Expect to more advancements and developments from us over the coming months.
While ETA wasn’t on Apple Watch on day 1, it wasn’t far behind. It started it’s life as a WatchKit extension bringing a handy glance and associated app.
Things really started to change when we moved to watchOS 2. Specifically ETA introduced a complication allowing you to view travel times (by car, transit and foot) right on your favourite watch face. The premise was there, and the potential was great. But for some it didn’t perform as expected. Today, that all changes.
As touched on above, the focus of this new version is a new Apple Watch app, glance and associated complication. You’ll notice some subtle design tweaks, better iconography to indicate traffic, a refined glance and app detail screen. You’ll also notice some nice additions like the ability to assign two locations to the complication. Find yourself at the primary and the secondary will automatically display. But the biggest enhancement is the under the covers. With this update we’ve overhauled and upgraded the way we update travel time and location changes in the background. While it’s not as visual as the other updates you’ll certainly notice the improvements.
What’s changed? Well back in November I went into detail surrounding the issues that we faced and the options available for us to improve the experience. At a high level we now use an unique combination of background fetch, silent push notifications, significant location change and region monitoring to trigger regular updates of travel time and location changes. While we’re using a number of different technologies to satisfy our background updates we’ve kept battery use to the ultimate minimum. In our tests, ETA is active as little as 2 minutes (maximum of 5) in the background in any 24 hour period. This represents around 1–2% of battery use for an average user.
We’re really excited about this release. We trust this improves the ETA experience for many users. We’re now looking forward to focusing on some great new features and added refinements to both ETA for Apple Watch and ETA for iPhone.
We’ve put together a handy guide (available here) with detailed screenshots to help you through any issues with this release. If that doesn’t solve your problem, or you have any questions or feedback please email us.
