Android Wear will support third-party custom watch faces in Android L

Shawn Knight

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google android wear

It's been less than a month since Google released the full SDK for Android Wear, the version of the company's mobile operating system designed specifically for smartwatches and other wearables. Since that time, there's been a lot of discussion regarding whether or not Google would support third-party custom watch faces.

While there are already some available in the Play Store, most don't really work correctly all of the time. That's because the developers have had to jump through hoops and hack their way to make custom watch faces. Fortunately, Google's on the case.

As outlined in a post from Google senior developer advocate Wayne Piekarski, Google will indeed support third-party custom watch faces via a custom watch face API.

Piekarski admitted that making a great watch face currently involves a fair bit of tweaking and as such, suggests not posting such faces publically to the Play Store until there is a stable, published API. Developers are instead encouraged to post them to the Alpha or Beta channels through the Play Developer Console.

So, when exactly will the custom watch face API be ready? Not anytime soon, unfortunately.

Google won't have everything ready until they migrate Android Wear to the Android L release later this year. The good news is that, when it finally does arrive, it'll allow devs to make good-looking faces that work well across multiple form factors, conserve battery and display the user's card stream nicely.

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