That's pretty awesome!
There are so many great ideas for watch faces, and all Apple is coming with are cartoon characters and photos. I will never upgrade my Series 5 if they don't add custom watch faces.
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Apple Explains Why Third-Party Watch Faces Still Aren't Supported on watchOS 10
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There are so many great ideas for watch faces, and all Apple is coming with are cartoon characters and photos. I will never upgrade my Series 5 if they don't add custom watch faces.
They did change the shape of the display for most releases actually. It used to be a rectangular display (2 sizes actually) with large bezels, over time the bezels shrunk, the display stretched, curved along the glass, new sizes got introduced, etc. This all requires work to make the watch faces look good on every devices, especially with 3rd party complications that sometimes don't scale well.
My main gripe with the watch faces we have now is that they're not really functional, most space is wasted by a giant clock dial, the interesting bit of a complication is covered by the clock hands, etc. Layout looks nice but it's terrible to use and cluttered if you have more than a few complications going on. Any G-shock or Casio shows more info in a more readable way.
Love this concept.
I think Apple should do what Lego did and have a submission process for new ideas, where a certain number of supporters triggers a development cycle.
It’s truly amazing that they’re incapable of giving this basic functionality. Not everyone wore analog watches back in the day. Many people, if not most, had digital watches. Most of these watches had seconds. It probably pains Apple that some of their customers were low-class enough to wear a Casio watch. It’s so nice of them to try to elevate us with their classy analog watch faces.
hahahaha you made me belly laugh in the office now everyone is looking at me. I feel the same way!!
This is such BS. This same reasoning applies to all other aspects of system integration — lockscreen widgets, homescreen Widgets, dynamic island and lockscreen “live activities”, etc.
It is definitely possible to have third-party watch faces, and for Apple to support them in spite of regular OS updates. Just like they do for all those other things.
Exactly. I've had the snoopy watch face for a couple of days, and beside missing a complications, I need at least one for medical reasons, they still need to optimize it a lot. I'd run out of battery by 5pm, when I normally make it to bed without needing to recharge.
That's like saying every iPhone, iPad, and Mac app needs to be an extremely good citizen. Some apps are designed and built well, and do good in the stores, then there are those that don't. They have to either improve or die off.
Yes as you stated there are some things you have to think about when designing a watch face, but you don't have to journey to some etheric plane to achieve that knowledge. Heck Apple is going to let users design apps that will literally be a few centimeters away from your eyeballs. Imagine the damage that can be done there.
I think the subtle implication here is that Apple doesn’t trust their App Store review team to enforce good design rules and I actually agre
I maintain a couple of apps and the review process is frustratingly inconsistent, apps that were perfectly fine get their minor updates refused because some random guy in the review team mistook something for something it’s not and flags your app for violating some rule
I maintain a couple of apps and the review process is frustratingly inconsistent, apps that were perfectly fine get their minor updates refused because some random guy in the review team mistook something for something it’s not and flags your app for violating some rule
I’m sure there are LOTS of YouTubers wanting an opportunity to have their Apple Watch followers download the RAGE SHATTER LEGION watch face
This would make a lot of sense but. It'd be super easy for them to just give an overlay in which you could select any wallpaper and customize hands and digital clock add widgets or other things to the screen. No different than any of the others except you control the background.
What a bunch of BS. Heck Samsung even puts out a program where you can seriously customize and upload your own watch faces.
I think the watch faces Apple internally developed will not excessively interfere with the battery life per charge on the Apple Watch, even the latest models. (People forget the Apple Watch is very battery constrained compared to the iPhone.) As such, allowing third party watch faces could result in "complications" that will drain the battery like drinking water, as my late mom used to say about cars with low fuel economy.
But is it a good idea? A lot of those DIY watch faces will result in more battery drain per charge than necessary, really important given the constraints of the battery on a device about the size of the Apple Watch Series 8 of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5.
Ah yes, the simplicity of half their watch faces that don't even have numbers or markers. Makes it very easy to roughly estimate the time, maybe...possibly.
You know what? Just let me make my own watch face or download one someone else made and let it be okay that it isn't "uniform and simple." Let it be okay that it sucks. As the end user, I don't need Apple to define taste and style for every available watch face. If it's crap or doesn't work well with other functions, that's on me. BTW my favorite simple and uniform watch face was downloaded to my first generation Pebble watch. I like it much better than anything Apple has offered.
I think it’s more about not wanting to have to create/support watch API’s that are flexible enough to allow developers to create whatever they can dream of while at the same time having the controls in place to prevent poorly coded watch faces. The API’s they currently have are only distributed to folks that they can “trust” as they’re on Apple’s payroll… they have a vested interest in NOT doing things poorly or wrong.
And, supporting that would also mean they’re forced to having SOME form of backwards compatibility going forward instead of just making wholesale framework changes anytime they want.
Considering the hue and cry that burst forth when 32 bit support was dropped for apps that no longer had dev teams, one wouldn’t be wrong for thinking there might have been a few kids out there.
What they MEANT to say was
“The number of folks that would NOT buy an Apple Watch solely due to not being able to fully customize the face is so small to the point that it doesn’t factor in to our calculations.”
“The number of folks that would NOT buy an Apple Watch solely due to not being able to fully customize the face is so small to the point that it doesn’t factor in to our calculations.”
There are ways around that - Apple has even designed some really good ones. For example, homescreen widgets are not constantly running; the widget runs once, a snapshot is taken, and it tells the OS when to schedule future updates. So weather might tell the system its content will be invalidated after 15 mins. The next time you unlock your device and are on the screen with the weather widget, the system will check to see if 15 mins have passed, and if so, refresh the widget. So it only actually runs very occasionally.
A similar thing can be done for watch faces. They would only update while visible, and could choose to update every minute/second depending on what they display.
People don’t generally spend a long time staring at the watch face, anyway. It contains glanceable information, not long-form or deep, interactive content.
"Things can break with an update" is their main excuse, yet, doesn't that go for any MacOS or iOS update too?