Vine Is On The Apple Watch, But Videos Lag And Sound Defaults To Loud

Vine has made its way on to the Apple Watch, giving watch wearers a new way to view video straight from their wrist. According to a blog post by the Twitter-owned short-form video sharing service, the app is essentially a distilled version of its full-fledged mobile app. But in practice it's hardly the best way to watch its growing collection of six-second videos.

The simplified watch app provides Apple Watch wearers access to two Vine feeds, Featured and Favorite Vine videos -- also known as Vines. The Featured section contains a curated collection of Vines chosen by the service’s staff. Users can also swipe left to view the Favorites section, which contains a collection of Vines from other accounts users choose to follow on the iPhone app. Vine users can watch the videos directly from the app, as well as like and favorite them -- if they can deal with the load times.

The Vines themselves can load in a couple of seconds. But the app can sometimes appear to slow down or lag while scrolling through content or waiting for the feed to refresh. It doesn't sound like a big deal at first, but holding up your wrist to watch a video can be tiresome in comparsion to just holding a cellphone to view Vine content. Not to mention that the Vine videos by default play through the Watch's built-in speaker, so it's not ideal for use in a quiet setting.

Vine creators that also post a lot of videos can keep track of how many times they’re watched by adding a custom Vine complication on the Apple Watch’s face. The service also introduced a change to its Vine app, which enables users to swipe left to view more Vine posts.

While the app does work on the Apple Watch, it’s a tiny screen to view any video content, especially when compared to the physical screen size of the iPhone 6S and the 6S Plus. When the Apple Watch first launched in April, it didn’t have support for video playback. Apple later added support via WatchOS 2 -- which was introduced to developers in June, followed by a public release in September.

Vine latest update comes over a month after Twitter COO Adam Bain revealed in an earnings call that video views on Twitter owned services have skyrocketed by 150 times in the past year, with 90 percent of the growth happening on mobile devices. Twitter looks to tap into video through a number of additions to its properties, including the Twitter Moments feature, which features a curated collection of tweets, video and Vines about particular subjects and events.