Microsoft is preparing to bring third-party apps to its Microsoft Band wearable platform. The company revealed today that it’s launching a Developer Preview SDK for the wrist-worn device, allowing third-party app makers to start to create apps for it, beyond the select partners, including MapMyFitness, that it already works with.
Opening Band to third-party apps means not only making it possible for devs to build apps for it, but it also gives Microsoft an opportunity to start building a library for future wearable devices, and to perhaps get more consumers interested in this generation and whatever comes next in less prototype-y versions of the Band.
There are many other features making their debut today for Microsoft Band, including a new Bike tile for tracking indoor and outdoor rides, featuring heart rate monitoring, revelation tracking, GPS, speed analytics, recovery, a web dashboard and more. Guided workouts now include indoor biking routines, accordingly. Quick Read is a new feature that gives you easier-reading notifications at-a-glance, and there’s a virtual keyboard that uses Microsoft’s new Word Flow predictive tech, and voice input via Cortana, though both of these require Windows 8.1 on a companion smartphone device.
Microsoft Health gets some updates today, too, including a dashboard for the web that uses data from the Microsoft Band to populate, and HealthVault, and MapMyFitness integrations.