Coin Flip Watch App

So I have an Watch (or, “Apple Watch” for the Unicode-impaired). It’s kinda gimmicky, but also surprisingly useful for things like notifications, mobile payments, and driving directions. And let’s not forget its role in nagging me to get off my lazy butt and move every once in a while:

Apple Watch nags me to stand up

Speaking of being lazy (and #FirstWorldProblems), I occasionally use an app on my phone to flip a coin when I need to make a quick tie-breaking decision and I don’t have any actual, um, coins. How cool would it be if I could flick a virtual coin on my watch?

Okay, maybe not very cool. But it might be an interesting learning experience. As far as I know, there aren’t many watch apps out there at all, so you might even have a shot at getting some exposure!

The Project

Build an Watch app with a single function: flipping a coin and randomly landing on heads or tails. Animating the flip and vibrating the landing with Taptic goodness would be a nice touch too (see what I did there?). From my understanding, I think this means you’ll need to have a companion app running on the iPhone for command-and-control, as it were. Could the implementation be as simple as packaging up four different animations and just triggering them?

  1. heads → tails
  2. heads → heads
  3. tails → heads
  4. tails → tails

Bonus Points

What if you could flick the virtual coin off your watch and have it land on your phone, or even another watch? Totally superfluous, I know, but if you could achieve that, imagine what you might be able to do with, say, peer-to-peer communications or hybrid physical/virtual games.