Android Wear devices are now on the wrists of regular consumers, and so it should come as no surprise that developers are busy crafting custom watch faces for those wearables. After all, customizability is one of the main draws of Google’s mobile OS. However, a Google executive has warned that devs may want to hold off on making their custom watch faces publicly available.
On his official Google+ page, Wayne Piekarski suggests that developers post their custom watch faces in Android’s alpha or beta channels rather than in the public Play Store. Piekarski, who is Google’s senior developer advocate, explains that custom watch faces have special ways that they interact with a user’s stream and Android Wear’s ambient mode that include a short peek card, moving battery and mute indicators and rendering faces a unique way in ambient mode. Google is working on an official custom watch face API to enable devs to make faces that “work well across multiple form factors, conserve battery, and display the user’s card stream nicely.”
Piekarski goes on to say that some of these tweaks won’t be available until Android Wear is updated to Android L later this year. He doesn’t say precisely when these changes will arrive, but he does promise that they’re on their way.
As I mentioned before, Android is all about personalization, so it makes sense that Google would support custom watch faces on Android Wear. It’s still exciting to get this news straight from El Goog, though, and I’m sure that the official custom watch face support and the promise of an Android L update makes some folks more interested in buying an Android Wear device.
Have you folks that’ve already added Android Wear to your wrist installed any custom watch faces yet?
Via Android and Me, Google+
