Elk

A travel currency converter on your wrist

Free From Clean Shaven Apps, cleanshavenapps.com Made for iPhone, Apple Watch Needs iOS 9.3 or later Despite the recent high-profile departure of apps like eBay, Google Maps, and Amazon from watchOS, there are still plenty of independent developers willing to support the smartwatch platform. Among the latest is Clean Shaven Apps, whose latest effort is a travel currency converter – and no, that’s not a typo.

While it may seem like a curious decision nine years after the App Store gold rush, Elk takes a unique approach that requires no keypad number entry. That’s not actually as limiting as it sounds, since you can swipe left to increase the values or right to decrease. Should you require greater accuracy, tapping a value allows for more granular control by turning the Digital Crown.

Although Elk is technically free, that only gets you support for your local currency, plus a curated selection of five popular rates – which kind of defeats the purpose. To unlock the full currency lineup, there’s a one-time $3.99 in-app purchase available through your iPhone, or you can opt for a free 14-day trial to take the full version of Elk for a spin before buying.

Despite it being optimized for watchOS 3, we did have issues launching Elk for the first time on our first-gen Watch – but uninstalling, rebooting the smartwatch, and reinstalling got things working. To be fair, this happens a lot on our device, but Elk seemed to be more stubborn than normal; the Watch app also failed to properly recognize the free trial had been activated.

The bottom line. Spend some time with the free trial before committing to buy, then wait for more bug fixes.