Someone managed to hack a web browser onto the Apple Watch

There are a few things that smartwatches are good for and a bunch of things that they’re not, web browsing being chief among them. There’s no official or third-party web browser for the Apple Watch, for obvious reasons, but a well-known developer and jailbreaker by the name of Comex has managed to hack a web browser into Watch OS… and it sucks. 

Prominent community developer and jailbreaker Comex has posted a video showing a successful hack of Watch OS to get the device running a web browser. In the video, Comex has managed to get the Google homepage to render on the small Watch display. Apple does not include a Safari browser app on the Watch, for obvious reasons. The video shows that scrolling around even basic web pages on a tiny display is impractical. More importantly, the video shows that it is possible to get the Watch to run arbitrary code. This could be the first step towards a ‘jailbreak’ of the Apple Watch although Comex makes no such promises to ever release the details of his hack. The video shows familiar iOS UI, like the Copy/Define contextual menu, which is an amusing look at the underlying software stack that powers the Watch. Watch OS 1.0 is actually a version of iOS 8.2 that runs a custom front-end layer to display the device-specific UI, called Carousel (Springboard is the iPad/iPhone equivalent).