In what is likely a push to better the Apple Watch experience for users, Apple has announced that all new watchOS apps submitted to the app store from June 1 forward must be native.
From Apple:
Starting June 1, 2016, all new watchOS apps submitted to the App Store must be native apps built with the watchOS 2 SDK or later.
Apple's watchOS 2, which rolled out to all last September, brought a number of improvements to the Apple Watch platform, including giving third-party apps access to certain hardware and software features that were previously inaccessible to developers.
Most importantly, however, watchOS 2 allows developers to build apps that run natively on the Apple Watch itself. Overall, this leads to much speedier performance from a given app by eliminating the need to stream data between the Watch and a connected iPhone. As more native apps populate the app store, the experience should only get better for Apple Watch users.
