Summary
- Watch Face Format revamp in Wear OS 5 includes support for goal progress, weighted elements, and current weather data.
- New Flavors feature allows preset configurations and personalized customization for watch faces at the tap of a button.
- Older watch face libraries will be phased out by Google in 2025, mandating all new watch faces to use the updated format.
After teaming with Samsung to revive Wear OS, Google again partnered with the Korean giant for the Watch Face Format. The new declarative XML format debuted at I/O 23, with Google claiming it would make designing watch faces easier. It was also a more battery-friendly format, with developers not having to write any executable code or power optimizations. But the new watch face format had a major issue: it only supported limited types of complications. Google is fixing this with the next iteration of Watch Face Format, which will ship with Wear OS 5.
First, Google is introducing support for Flavors. This will allow developers to offer preset configurations of their watch faces with different colors and configurations. Users can browse all available flavors of a watch face from the companion app on their phone and apply the one they like. Or they can customize the watch face to their liking.
The next Watch Face Format release supports goal progress and weighted elements complications. The former is ideal for tracking a specific goal, like your step count or daily active minutes. With weighted elements, Google says complications can show “discrete subsets of data, showing their relative sizes, where you might otherwise use something like a pie chart.”
If you are frustrated about not being able to see current weather conditions right from the watch face, Wear OS 5 will fix that as well. The new Watch Face Format release supports current weather data alongside the forecast data by day and hour for complications.
Google will phase out older watch face libraries in 2025
Besides improving the Watch Face Format, Google is introducing some limitations for watch faces made with AndroidX or the Wearable Support Library. They will have access to data sources for complications.
More importantly, in early 2025, Google is mandating that all watch faces published on the Play Store use the new Watch Face Format. Developers can continue updating their existing watch faces built using the older libraries but cannot publish new ones. A more specific date as to when this change will go into effect will be revealed in Q4 2024.
