Apple Watch

watchOS 4.3.1 suggests future support for third party watch faces [U]

Guilherme Rambo | Apr 14 2018 - 4:36 pm PT

Update (4/16): Steve Troughton-Smith warns that this might not be what it looks like:

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/985819954137182208

Ever since the Apple Watch was introduced, developers have been asking for the ability to create their own watch faces. Currently, only Apple can provide watch faces, while some of them have content from Pixar and Disney. The reasons for the lack of third party faces can be many, including Apple’s desire to control the experience and branding as much as possible.

Code found on watchOS 4.3.1 suggests this could change in the future. A component of the NanoTimeKit framework, responsible for the watch faces, implements a developer tools server that’s probably designed to communicate with Xcode running on a Mac. One of its methods has a very interesting log message: “This is where the 3rd party face config bundle generation would happen”

It’s clear from the wording of the message that this feature is not implemented at the moment, but it’s definitely something Apple has planned. This new capability could come as soon as watchOS 5, or be dropped altogether. I personally hope they go forward with it since it’d be pretty cool to be able to install new watch faces on my Apple Watch.