WatchMe Messenger looks like Japan’s first killer Apple Watch app

Noriega (left) with his brother Anwar, the startup’s CCO.

With analysts predicting up to 3 million Apple Watches sold in the first quarter of this year, the race is on for developers to capture early adopters of the tech giant’s first wearable device. In Japan, signs of an early killer app for the new platform are already beginning to appear.

Tokyo-based startup Pocket Supernova, the 500 Startups-backed team behind VideoSelfie and Unda, hit the ground running with a launch-day messaging app for Apple Watch that’s featured on both the main page of the Japanese App Store and its Apple Watch section. WatchMe Messenger isn’t only a big deal in Japan either, as Tech in Asia very briefly spotted its home screen icon during Apple’s March 9 reveal for the Watch in San Francisco.

Pocket Supernova co-founder and CEO Oscar Noriega describes WatchMe Messenger as a “video messaging app with contextual decorations and dynamic text animations.”

“We reused our prior experience and reconnected the dots,” he says. “Unda helped us with messaging and Video Selfie helped us with the deco side. We combined everything we learned and squashed it together into this tiny little Apple Watch app.”

Getting animated

When using the watch by itself, WatchMe offers one-tap replies to incoming messages via six default animated emoji. Tapping the on-screen mic icon allows a wearer to initiate what Noriega calls “speech to animation” – text coupled with a simple animated PNG sequence (because the Apple Watch doesn’t support GIFs).

Screen captures of WatchMe Messenger running on Apple Watch.

Despite being billed as an Apple Watch app, the fun really happens when a WatchMe user has their iPhone handy. The app instantly assigns animations based on a user’s text or voice input, which can then be overlaid on a three-second video. Shot at 90fps, the video is downsampled to 15fps and converted to a PNG sequence which can then be sent to and viewed on a friend’s Apple Watch.

When Noriega typed “Coffee time” (in Japanese – the app supports English, Japanese, and simplified Chinese), a floating coffee cup appeared on the screen. When I typed “Too hot in this office” I ended up with sunglasses and palm trees. Each input generates three animations: one for the text, one that matches the context of the message, and one random – all of which can be quickly repositioned by touching and dragging. Some of those animations utilize Video Selfie’s face-tracking technology.