Apple Can’t Sell Watch in Switzerland Until December Over IP Rights, Developers Testing Apps

Maybe Switzerland’s watch industry doesn’t have quite so much to fear from Apple’s (AAPL) impending Watch, at least for the next six months.

An intellectual property issue likely will delay Apple’s launch of the Watch in Switzerland until December 5, according to a report from Swiss broadcaster Radio Television Suisse (RTS) picked up by Reuters.

Apple apparently can’t use either a picture of an apple or the word itself to launch its Watch in Switzerland without violating a patent belonging to William Longe dating to 1985 on file with the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, RTS reported on its website. Longe owns the Swiss watch brand Leonard that first filed the patent, which expires on December 5 of this year.

RTS reprinted the document on its website as published by the trade magazine Business Montres & Joaillerie.

Neither Apple nor the Swiss IP agency offered comments to Reuters.

Apple’s Watch is set to launch on April 24 in stores in nine countries, with pre-orders beginning on Friday, April 10 in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan.

Sales expectations already are high with Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster forecasting in an investors’ note that the vendor will sell some 1 million units of the wearable device in its first weekend, driven by 300,000 in pre-orders. Other analysts have projected the vendor could sell 20 – 40 million units of the Watch by year’s end.

Developers test Watch apps

Separately, the Financial Times reported that small groups of developers are trekking to Apple’s Silicon Valley labs to test and prep their apps for the Watch as the vendor bears down on the April 24 launch date.

The “few dozen” designers and engineers, all hand-picked by Apple, daily are watched over by security guards and must cover up the cameras on the iPhones when on the premises, the report said.

Prior to Apple’s March press event to showcase the Watch, only high-ranking iPhone developers received invitations to Apple’s labs to test their apps on the Watch. But in the succeeding weeks, about 20 developers a day show up at the labs, sources told the Financial Times.

Most Watch developers have worked on their apps without ever interacting with the actual device, instead relying on a simulator running on a Mac that’s part of the Watchkit development package of tools Apple released last year, the report said.