Third-party watch faces on Android Wear seem like a no-brainer—there's an app store, developers can make apps for the platform, and there is even a method for switching among the packed-in watch faces. Official documentation on how to make a custom watch face doesn't exist, though. While Google will gladly tell developers how to use every other facet of Wear, it has been strangely quiet about making a watch face. That hasn't stopped developers from figuring it out on their own, though, with the Play Store already home to several custom faces.
Today Google has finally broken its silence. As it turns out, there's more work to be done on Google's part. Wayne Piekarski, a senior developer advocate at Google, has said the company is "hard at work on a custom watch face API." While custom watch faces are currently possible, right now Piekarski admits "making a really great watch face currently takes a fair bit of tweaking." The Googler says the upcoming API includes "using a shorter peek card, moving the status indicators for battery and mute, and rendering the faces differently in ambient mode."
The bad news is the timing. Piekarski says, "Some of these changes won't be ready until we migrate Android Wear to the Android L release later this year." If the L release timing is anything like KitKat, it is still something like three months away. Piekarski also warns that current watch faces are not supported and may not work on future versions. He recommends not publishing the app to the Play Store (or only publishing using the Alpha/Beta channels) until the official API comes out.
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