How Apple's WWDC Presentation Could Ignite Apple Watch Sales

Apple Inc. AAPL kicked off the 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference with a lengthy presentation regarding OS X, iOS, Swift and the firm's new music service. It was everything a developer could hope for, but some investors wanted more. "I, like most of Wall Street, was disappointed with it," Cody Willard, chairman of Scutify (a financial social network) and Futr (a futuristic messaging app), told Benzinga. "I wasn't expecting anything big announced this soon after the Apple Watch had been released, but the [event was] too long." Willard said the event was "boring" while Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry praised everything except the Apple Music reveal. Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, kept his expectations in check. "It's a developer conference," Enderle told Benzinga. "Their developers are making more money than anybody else right now. The key point was the $30 billion [paid to developers]. That's the important part." Kartik Chandrayana, co-founder and CEO of Twin Prime (a startup that wants to make apps run faster), thinks there might be more value coming out of WWDC than investors realize. "The Watch OS announcement was one of the highlights for me," Chandrayana told Benzinga. "It really broadens the appeal for Watch and makes it viable as a standalone. Developers can build native apps on Watch -- i.e., they don't have to use a phone to access some functionalities." Given that Apple has native Wi-Fi access on the watch, Chandrayana said that developers "can now build any app on it, even ones which go to the network to fetch data." Chowdhry has noted many times that by having more apps, Apple can sell more watches. Thus, this could be the first step in boosting Apple Watch sales. "It will be interesting to see how fast the apps are, as there were already some recent news on the slow speed of apps on the Apple Watch," Chandrayana noted.

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'Playing Catch Up'

Chandrayana may have been impressed with the Apple Watch updates, but he (like everyone else) noted that Apple had taken a few things from its competitors. "Apple's announcements on iOS were playing catch up to some functionalities which are present on other platforms," he said. "One thing I enjoyed a lot was giving access to developers to search inside the apps. The search on mobile phone is completely broken and this announcement will help fix that."

Just For M-Commerce

Chandrayana expects Apple Pay to be a "big boon for m-commerce." "It takes away the pain of filling out credit card information on a small screen without worrying about security," he added. "Apple mentioned that merchants who use Apple Pay are seeing a 2X increase in checkout rate." Chandrayana also praised the battery life improvements for Apple's iDevices. "Apple managed to squeeze an extra hour of battery life out of iOS 9," he concluded. "That's huge. [It] will be great to see where those gains come from. Maybe they will share some more information with developers on it, so that we can all design efficient, battery conserving apps." Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.