The AppAdvice tech week in review: The Apple Watch effect, Black Friday deals

Here’s our Sunday look back at the week that was:

The biggest story of the week: The Apple Watch’s impact

It will never be as popular as the iPhone. Nonetheless, the Apple Watch is beginning to have an impact on the watch industry, nine months after the wearable device first debuted.

This week, Bloomberg reported that exports of Swiss watches have reached a six-year low and now stand at just $2 billion.

As Joe White noted:

Yet for the smart watch industry, the situation couldn’t be more different; here, the Apple Watch has helped the industry rocket, and it seems low-end luxury watch brands have suffered most greatly since Cupertino’s device hit the market. Fossil Group Inc., for instance, “saw its stock slump 37 percent Nov. 13 after saying fourth-quarter sales may decline as much as 16 percent amid competition with wearable technology,”

In the meantime, Digitimes reports that Apple is currently on track to sell more than 10 million Apple Watches in 2015, including 4 million units during the holiday shopping season.

The “Apple Watch 2″ is expected to hit the market in the second or third quarter of 2016.

Also making news: Apple is working on a new troubleshooting tool

Apple is in the process of developing an iOS app designed to help troubleshoot issues with iPhones and iPads. The news comes from uSwitch Tech, which is showing off images provided to them by Sonny Dickson.

White notes:

Here, the publication explains that, “according to an insider with knowledge of goings-on at Apple’s Infinite Loop HQ,” the in-development application asks customers “basic questions to boil down the problem” affecting iOS devices quickly. The app also allows users to “book a service, send their device in for service, or give a call to Apple.”

Of course, the application is designed to help users in the process of organizing a repair for their iOS device. And indeed, this is something Apple needs to be focusing on, given the frequent impossibility of securing Genius Bar reservations at a great many Apple Stores. Through asking customers the right questions, too, Apple’s upcoming app should better ensure that devices aren’t sent off for repair when they could, instead, have rather been fixed at home.

This new troubleshooting tool might arrive next year with “iOS 10.”

Other news:

Big app news: Zite is no more, as of Dec. 7

Zite is set to reach its very last page soon. The once popular personalized news reader app is scheduled to be shut down on Monday, Dec. 7.

The closure should come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with the significant happenings that have shaped the direction of Zite. In fact, it’s been a long time coming.

Zite was launched on iOS in March 2011 and acquired by CNN just months later, in August 2011. It stayed with the news network until Flipboard, its chief competitor in the social news aggregation space, swooped in and purchased it in March 2014.

Other app news: