Put on OS 5 has killed Facer, Pujie, WatchMaker, and all watch face creativity

For months now, I’ve been wanting to sit down down and lament the truth that my Pixel Watch 3 has fewer watch face choices than the Pixel Watch 2 and 1, and the identical is true for the Galaxy Watch 7 in comparison with the earlier Watch 6, 5, and 4. At present is lastly the day, so let’s check out what’s occurring with our most beloved smartwatches and whether or not issues may change anytime quickly.

These restricted face choices have been a difficulty since each watches landed in late summer season / early fall, and it’s all because of Put on OS 5. With this new model of the platform, Google made Watch Face Format obligatory, which nerfed each customized watch face app on the market, just like the beloved Facer, Pujie, KWCH, WatchMaker, and extra. A number of months down the road, the difficulty continues to be there, with no resolution in sight for individuals who love this customization or the builders behind these apps.

In Could of 2023, Google introduced Watch Face Format, an XML template for designers that lets them create new watch faces that behave in addition to native ones. This preset template was made to fight the slew of poorly designed, poorly purposeful faces that ate away at our watches’ battery life, by no means confirmed the best stats, and required separate companion apps on our telephones to run.

It took some time, however Watch Face Format (WFF) began getting adopted by many builders, leading to light-weight faces that combine instantly into the Pixel Watch and Galaxy Wearables app, sip on the battery, and assist all the identical watch face issues (the little battery stats, steps, and whatnot) because the faces that ship instantly in your smartwatch.

The one concern with WFF faces, as you’ll be able to guess, is that they don’t permit for a lot creativity. Since builders should observe a template, there’s little room to transcend the confines of what Google permits. Animated backgrounds, for one, appear subsequent to not possible. The faces are a bit uniform and monotonous, and you need to dig for some time to seek out some gems that handle to eschew the default Google-heavy look. Over time, although, Google has added extra capabilities to the template, and now you will discover some nice examples on the Play Retailer.

For a couple of 12 months, Watch Face Format and non-WFF faces coexisted. I might set up each sorts on my Pixel Watch 2 and have the very best of each worlds: optimized faces with little creativity and unoptimized faces with quite a lot of creativity.

Facer (10+ million installs), Pujie (100,000+ installs), WatchMaker (5+ million installs), and KWCH (10,000+ installs) fall inside that latter class. They’re basically giant umbrella apps that allow you to create watch faces from scratch, import templates made by different customers, and/or purchase premade faces. Right here’s a small pattern of some free faces I used to be capable of get from Facer again in 2022. None of those had been good, however I like how totally different and distinctive all of them had been!

All of those apps use their very own templates and design paradigms. And since their app basically acts as a market of third-party faces, none of them are supported by WFF, which requires each face to be printed individually to the Play Retailer.

How Put on OS 5 spelled the tip of Facer, Pujie, KWCH, and WatchMaker

With Put on OS 5, Google determined that sufficient is sufficient — watch face builders both needed to play alongside and undertake the common template, or they wouldn’t be capable of get their creations on individuals’s wrists. Beginning with the Galaxy Watch 7 and Pixel Watch 3, you merely couldn’t set up a face in your watch if it wasn’t constructed utilizing Watch Face Format. (In case your watch got here with Put on OS 3 or 4 out of the field and also you up to date it to Put on OS 5, you continue to retain entry to non-WFF faces, for now.)

Primarily, this made it not possible to make use of any non-WFF faces I’d beforehand purchased or any app like Facer, Pujie, KWCH, or WatchMaker. On my Pixel Watch 3, for a number of months, the Play Retailer would even fully pressure shut if I dared seek for the phrase “facer” or “pujie.” Now, it both throws me different watch face options or it spins indefinitely whereas saying it didn’t discover any outcomes.

Should you’re insistent sufficient, you may be capable of bypass this utilizing Put on Installer 2 and this trick shared by u/wowbyowen, however usually, it’s protected to say that non-WFF faces are going the way in which of the dodo on Put on OS.

Up to now, this has all been gloom and doom, and my preliminary analysis into the subject revealed the same pessimism from many customers and builders alike.

Frank from the KWCH crew summed it up properly:

There may be nothing I (or some other customized watchface like watchmaker or facer) can do about this, this must be mounted by the seller permitting customized watchface software to be put in.

However as soon as I dug in, I seen that different builders appeared extra optimistic — emphasis on the previous tense as a result of all these statements date again to a few months in the past. For instance, the Pujie crew shared this on Reddit:

The Pixel Watch 3, the Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch 7 Extremely solely assist watch faces made with the Watch Face Format. Sadly this format, because it exists proper now, is just not appropriate for superior interactive watch faces like those you may make with Pujie and might solely be put in from the Play Retailer.

Relaxation assured, along with different watch face builders, I’m speaking with Google to see if there’s a resolution to this downside. Hopefully I can replace this data quickly.

I can’t discover any official phrase from KWCH, however u/acpjaydixit claims they reached out to them, they usually reiterated that they’re additionally working with Google to discover a resolution. This was additionally 4 months in the past.

We have now been working with Google on this venture for 18 months and will definitely be supporting WFF as soon as that is attainable for market apps akin to WatchMaker.

The clearest and most detailed reply, although, comes from Facer. Given the app’s reputation and its giant set up base on 10+ million units, you’ll be able to think about how big the loss is to the followers of this app, in addition to the creators utilizing it as a platform to monetize and promote their designs, and the crew behind Facer. In a lengthy weblog submit shared by itself boards, the Facer crew defined the difficulty with Put on OS 5 and Watch Face Format, mentioned that it’s working with Google to repair this concern, and promised to proceed manually changing a few of its hottest faces to the WFF.

For customers of the Pixel Watch 3, Samsung Galaxy Watch7 and Extremely, we’re working laborious with Google to carry the Facer service to you as properly, and till that’s performed we’ll progressively carry a few of our greatest watch faces to you within the Google Play retailer. You could find these faces right here.

As soon as once more, this was three months in the past. There’s been radio silence since then.

I actually respect Watch Face Format and the standardized necessities it’s dropped at the Wild West of watch faces. I additionally need the format to turn into extra broadly adopted, however I don’t need this to be on the expense of the intricate customization and creativity that apps like Facer and Pujie supply. I can solely hope that Google continues to be making an attempt to accommodate these builders to make their beloved apps accessible on Put on OS 5.