As a Garmin user testing many custom watch faces draining battery I think Apple is right on this.
It doesn't even make sense what they're saying -As with everything else, Apple would simply provide clear guidelines for 3rd party devs and then have a team review each watch face before it becomes available, testing whether or not the watch face meets Apple's standards.Weak. They should allow them, period. It's not like they change the overall shape of the watch, ever. The watch faces from series 0 all work for God's sake on the Series 8 so I don't see how compatibility is an issue. Apple just wants control over the faces like they do everything else. That's fine, but spare me the BS of uniformity.
That's not entirely true. All of the Series 0-3 faces were redesigned to fit and scale well to the new screens of the S4+.
But aside from that, the point is that each watch face has to be designed to work with so many things, like the customization UI and how color tinting works with colors the face wasn't originally designed for. But the most difficult part is the Always-On Display. You have to think about how the UI fades when the displays dims, how the minute hand/number can raise the refresh rate temporarily every 30 seconds, how the face wakes back up and the UI readjusts to its "precision" state where the minute hand reflects number of seconds as well, etc. Basically, every custom face would have to be an extremely "good citizen".
horrific
I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder but maaaaaan are those definitely not my cup of tea...This really should be allowed natively without having to use an app.
Basically, The demand for them is basically limited to a few hundred people and they don’t want to invest the resources required to develop the ability to do that and then support it.Weak. They should allow them, period. It's not like they change the overall shape of the watch, ever. The watch faces from series 0 all work for God's sake on the Series 8 so I don't see how compatibility is an issue. Apple just wants control over the faces like they do everything else. That's fine, but spare me the BS of uniformity.
This is question of taste and design.So developers can make incredible billion dollar games, and software that does incredible things like image recognition and AR/VR, but Apple doesn’t trust them making a Watch Face???
100% BS. Apple just wants control.
I enjoy analog faces occasionally, when I'm in a retro mood, but digital faces with multiple complications are what makes the Watch truly useful. I sometimes even find myself wishing I could swap out the time for another complication, so I can fit all related data in one screen.I don't want analog faces; it's digital. Let me have at least a text-builder option. So few options with seconds, and many of the complications are simply hard to read.
Honestly, carrying on the idea that people want round, analog watch faces with a bunch of dials is the worst form of skewmorphism that Apple has held since the desktop was that leather thing.
This is question of taste and design.