The tech giant Apple has made some huge improvements to the Apple Watch user experience over the past few years. The device has become significantly faster and has been overhauled to make it much more intuitive and easier to use. The recent Apple watches have some great solid features with increased fitness and health tracking proficiencies, while also having the LTE connectivity feature.
This has caused the sales of Apple Watch to skyrocket over the past years. Having said that, there is one feature that Apple lovers have been patiently waiting for to be added: A support for third-party watch faces. Although the concept of Apple’s new wearables featuring the support of third-party watch faces creates an incredible amount of enthusiasm, it has never really materialized.
The latest rumour states that Apple might be planning to incorporate this feature sooner than later. A developer of an online blog found data strings in the latest watch OS 4.3.1 beta, which showed a message within the beta’s NanoTimeKit framework that read, “This is where the 3rd party face configuration would happen”. While this isn’t a concrete promise, it certainly is convincing evidence.
Unlike Wear OS, Watch OS has never supported a third-party watch face. One of the benefits of having a smartwatch is that you can change the face whenever you like, but up until now the only choices have been the ones made by Apple. Although some of those watch faces are very nice indeed, letting other developers in would no doubt see a great variety in the number of watch faces.
Although Apple hasn’t yet said anything about the change, the WWDC Developer’s Conference in June is a good bet for an announcement on the next version of WatchOS.
As the Watch OS shows, letting third-party developers make their own watch faces would lead to a lot of average designs as well as a lot of great ones, but given Apple’s control freak nature, it will definitely put some kind of screening, like it does with full apps.
Additionally, Apple stopped accepting updates for Watch OS1 applications along with warning the macOS users and developers last summer that 32-bit apps would be disabled in a post-Sierra update.
Also, with Google coming up with its own wearable platform and cheaper alternatives like the Fitbit, Apple must be feeling the pressure to stay on top of its game.