For the most part this brings most of the Foursquare functionality to the wrist which is useful for existing Foursquare users with an Apple Watch but I'm more curious what the next version looks like. Can you share any features you wished you would have launched with or have planned, @dens?

Awesome! Definitely something I was waiting for (still missing the checkin on the Watch though). Looking at the way Foursquare has to explain how to double-check all the settings on the product launch page makes me think that there is still a lot of things to do to improve how user configures settings in any apps - especially apps based off notifications.

This is exciting. The only thing I ever used my AndroidWear watch for was to checkin via a 3rd party Swarm app. In fact, its the only time I check in on Swarm.

I currently don't use 4SQ on iOS, but I do use Swarm. However, I imagine for Apple Watch, this will be *super* useful and worthy of downloading. Definitely turning me into a 4SQ user, again. I love the idea of something coming up when I'm near by, giving me an overview and aiding me in the decision making process. At the same time, I'm wondering whether or not this will be buddied up eventually with Swarm, to tell me not only about an awesome place to visit nearby, but also a notification when friends are pinged close to my location. Either way, super nifty!

@dens this is uber-exciting to see (and feel on your wrist). I've always wanted to not miss hot spots or hidden spots when I pass-em by, it reminds me of going to New York and not being able to find a decent sushi place. I was looking for Blue Ribbon and could not find it when I was right next to it. However, do you think it really makes sense to separate Foursquare and Swarm in the watch? You could provide a seamless experience here.

IMO, Apple Watch will help more people understand why Foursquare split its app. I don't want to check in on my watch, but I do want to know when I'm near a restaurant on my save list, and when I'm in a restaurant I want to glance at the best tips without violating the phone-at-the-table rule.

This is a great use of watch functionality! If Foursquare's tips can get smart enough to be relevant in the moment, this could be a joy to use. Key is that they're serving up the right recommendations at the right moment. I've replaced my use of Yelp with Foursquare entirely unless I'm nervous about a place's rating (trust Yelp's rating more). Foursquare search function on my watch will make me a hero in so many social scenarios ;)

@dens Will beacon alerts be tied into the experience? Would find push notifications on the watch in this use case super helpful and a reason to give Apple my $350+.

Awesome. Another place to not use 4sq

This certainly is one of the apps I would expect on a watch. "A Serendipity" moments when it tells you a friend is nearby would be awesome.

Is your team working on Swarm for Apple Watch too @dens?

Oh hey! Honored to see our first Apple Watch app show up on Product Hunt. So three things real quick… :) #1. This is exciting to us, not because you can tap tap tap and scroll thru a little UX on your wrist to find a great place for lunch. This is exciting to us because smart, contextual-notifications that you can read at a glance can be pretty incredible. And when they’re about the place where you are or another great place a hundred yards away, they can make you feel like you have superpowers. #2. We’re been working towards this “when you walk around, your phone should buzz you and tell you about the awesome things you don’t yet know about” vision of the future for a long time. Honestly, we were thinking about this stuff with Dodgeball @ Google, and were motivated to build Foursquare because we wanted this to exist so badly. So, want a brief history of how we got from 2009 -> 2015? 2009. Check out this screenshot from Foursquare 1.0 — From the very beginning, you’d check-in and “tips” for places nearby would pop up with the intent being “we should all have a piece of software in our pockets that teaches you about all the awesome things nearby". But back then, the only way to trigger these “awesome things nearby” messages was to press that check-in button over and over and over again. A bunch of you probably remember seeing these "pop-up tips" in Foursquare (and we still have them in Swarm). Our goal was always to make these messages pop-up without the user ever having to *do* anything…. make them pop-up by just walking around. Turns out this is really hard. 2011. The iPhone 4S comes out w/ iOS5 (first version of iOS to offer passive geofencing in the background). It was a more limited than we wanted/expected — you could only have a couple dozen geofences set at once and meanwhile we had 100,000 things we wanted to teach you about NYC (not to mention every other city in the world). This is where we started to think “if we really want this to work, we’re going to have to build this engine ourselves, from scratch— geofencing, stop-detection, contextual-awareness”. And that was when we started working on a project called “Pilgrim.” (Google it for more info) 2013. We finally get Pilgrim working the way we want it to. Using a “virgin" Android phone (no friends, no checkins) I walk into the cupcake shop down the street from Foursquare HQ and get a ping telling me to try the “Dreaming Princess” cupcake (which was delicious, btw) — https://instagram.com/p/dmjF7jmvtv/ -- which lead to my first “holy shit, this thing actually works” moment. The geofences we were using this time were not circles, but rather abstract patterns created from the GPS/wifi signal shapes that we have derived from our billions of checkins. We also realize that places have “fingerprints” (open/closed hours, popular hours, types of people that go there) and people have “fingerprints” (places you’ve been, categories you’re likely to go to). We discover that it’s the combination of these three things — venue shapes, venue attributes, user patterns — that allows us to have a high confidence about the place you just stopped at and what’s else would be interesting nearby. We launch this slowly, testing to make sure people dig the notifications, that people tap on them, that we’re not sending too many, that people don’t turn notifications off or delete the app because of them. All signs point towards it’s working and people dig it. We launch to millions of users. We roll out a Pebble version end of 2013. 2014: Google/Android Watch comes out and this “buzz your wrist instead of your phone” story starts to feel more real. I get a Moto360 and the first day I wear it, I walk into a restaurant deep in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) and it buzzes me with a suggestion of what cocktail to order and what dish to try — https://instagram.com/p/suROb4mviv/ I have a “holy shit, it works on your wrist... and it actually feels right” moment. We start feeling super confident that we’re sending good quality pings to folks when they stop at interesting places. We gain the ability to detect when people are in new neighborhoods vs familiar neighborhoods, and learn to turn up the awareness when people are visiting new cities. I took a trip to Tokyo in December, was walking thru Harakuju (neighborhood) and Foursquare buzzed my phone telling me about a hipster coffee shop and an arcade 100 yards ahead of me. I had my “holy shit this works everywhere” moment. 2015: Apple makes the watch that people want to wear. We’re feeling pretty good about the Pilgrim engine, the venue shapes, the tip quality our the stop-detection algorithms. We’re now sending tens of millions of pings to people’s phones every month. We start getting really excited about sending tens of millions of pings to people's wrists in the same way. Is it perfect? No. Do we get it right every time? No. Does it get smarter and more accurate every week? You bet. Will it be smarter/better/faster 3 months from now. Of course. And, more importantly, are we actually building and launching the things that we dreamed up 6+ years ago? Hell yeah. -d @dens / co-founder & CEO ps: Oh, I almost forgot… #3. Yes, yes, yes… Swarm app coming soon. Prob in about two weeks? We’re working on a bunch of pretty fun changes to Swarm and we wanted to group them all together. Swarm Watch app will be pretty basic to start, but like everything else we work on here, we got big plans :) ---- Oh, one more thing, before you start playing around with the Foursquare app, do me a favor and make sure both your iOS Settings & Foursquare Settings are set up properly. And remember, it takes a few days from when you first download the app before you really start getting pings (we take some time to learn about your travel patterns). Thx! Settings here: http://cl.ly/image/461u2t1r0r2l