Google allows smartwatch developers to change watch faces
Google has announced that it will let developers build interactivity into its Android Wear watch face. This allows developers to make smart watches easier to use, allowing any data to be displayed on the front screen and, rather than having to navigate to every app, users can now open apps with a single tap.
Among watchmakers, a complication refers to any mechanism on a watch that does something other than tell time. They're essentially analog apps that live on the watch face: chronographs, date displays, moon phases, and the like.

Things work a little differently in Google's smartwatch universe. In an effort to ensure its Android Wear watch faces remain clean and simple, complications have been kept behind swipes, notifications, and "OK Google" commands. The watch face has, until now, been reliably static.

Google changed course today, announcing that it will let developers build interactivity into watch faces. Tap on an Android Wear watch face and all sorts of things can happen. You can see an expanded weather forecast, dive deeper into your activity monitoring data, or open your latest email without ever leaving the first screen. It's a little like the way Apple handles complications, but could soon turn into something much more. And in a lot of ways, this added functionality is just the most recent attempt to figure out how we can and should be using this new form of gadgetry. Smartwatches haven't really caught on; making them even simpler to use might help.

It’s easy to see where this might go. Pong on your watch face? A brilliant distraction. Want to change the color-way of your watch face? Just give the screen a touch. And as cool as that stuff might be, it's just the beginning of how smartwatches might change as we bring interactivity to the front of the watch experience.

The smartwatch face is a crazy-undervalued feature. It's the first screen you see. It’s there to tell the time, sure, but it’s also a huge opportunity to define how you should interact with your device. A more functional face can provide faster access to the things you do most often and help alleviate some of the inherent slowness of a smartwatch, circumventing slow loading times and awkward first-generation interfaces. So what happens when all of a sudden your watch face starts to feel less like a cosmetic cover and more like an app?

That’s what we’re about to find out.

Shallow Experiences

Brett Lider likes to bike to work. Since he's the head of Android Wear’s design team, you might figure he uses his watch as an activity monitor. On a daily basis Lider opens an activity monitoring app like Strava and activates its always-on mode, which allows an individual app to stay on the watch's display. It's a clever hack, putting Strava at the forefront of his smartwatch experience. The thing is, Lider still had to navigate to his app, launch it, and wait for it to load before he can get going. He wanted to do it right from the watch's face instead. “With a single tap I could have launched the app to record my bike ride,” he says. “Any other way than being directly on the watch face is going to take significantly more time, and there's no way around that.”

Right now you might be saying, So what? It’s not like it’s hard to swipe right to open an app. But the way Lider sees it, if a key selling point for the smartwatch is glanceability and ease of use, it stands to reason the watch should be as simple to use as possible. “Speed of access is important in general and especially important for devices in a new category,” he says. “Anything we can do to reduce friction and increase usability is changing the calculation for the space.”