How To Create A Custom Watch Face

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Want to Create Your Own Apple Watch Face? Good Luck

Apple's walled-garden approach to its ecosystem persists with the Apple Watch, which does not support third-party watch faces. To get around this, creative developers like David Smith have been fiddling with complications, which pull in data from official apps.

There are currently 34 available Apple Watch faces, not counting the Nike or Hermes variants. And while you can customize them by changing colors and styles, you're ultimately stuck with a watch face created by Apple.

Custom third-party watch faces are technically possible , but it requires an app maker to side-load through the development software on their computers. That doesn't help watch wearers since Apple has yet to allow watch face distribution via the App Store, and it's anyone's guess as to whether it ever will.

Customizing Watch Faces Through Complications

Despite the lack of official support, distributing a more custom watch face is possible with some creativity. Just ask app developer David Smith, who is trying to get around Apple's limitations by focusing on Apple Watch complications, or information pulled in from apps.

"Other than the design of the watch hands or appearance of the digital time numerals, I can do a whole lot with the complication tools I already have," Smith writes in a blog post.

Smith has been fiddling with custom Apple Watch faces for awhile now, but as he acknowledged on Twitter last year, "I make them as regular watch apps and then use a few hacks to make them persistent. But you [lose] the actual watch face interactions."

To avoid that, he's now focusing on enhanced complications in an effort he's dubbed Project Geneva. "I'm going to see just how far I can push customizability and design," he says.

His first watch app is called Geneva Moon, which "seeks to provide a highly accurate, visually pleasing indication of what the moon looks like right now, right where you are," the app description says. "My goal was to make it so that if you look down at your wrist and then up into the sky the images you see should match." Choose between a visually rich "actual" appearance or a more simplified version, Smith says.

Apple Watch Face

The app will set you back $1.99. It's an Apple Watch-only app, meaning you download it from the new App Store on your Apple Watch, a feature that requires watchOS 6 and iOS 13. If you have an Apple Watch Series 5 with the compass, Geneva Moon will orient itself toward the actual moon.

" I've been making Apple Watch apps since the first-generation watch, but it wasn't until now that whatever you choose as your complications are permanently on display for the world around you," Smith tells PCMag. "I think that the more developer interest this area gets, the more likely it is that Apple invests in improving the tools that third parties have for making really awesome complications."

Smith built Geneva Moon using SwiftUI, which allows for more "interactive and lively" Apple Watch apps. "The compass mode feature especially wouldn't really have been practical or performant to build using WatchKit," Smith writes in a separate blog post. "Also, it is an Apple Watch only app, which means I didn't have to build a hosting iPhone app."

Apple Watch Face

Other Apple Watch apps focusing on complications include Better Day, which offers a host of date options that can be customized through the phone app. Unlike Geneva Moon, though, its goal isn't to remake the face of Apple Watch.

When Could Apple Allow Third-Party Apps?

Apple has usually been slow to provide customization options across its products. It's easy to forget, for example, that it took three years before Cupertino allowed the iPhone home screen wallpaper to be changed from its default black color with OS 4 in 2010.

But allowing watch faces from more developers will help solve issues people have with Apple's default faces, such as those that unnecessarily cover information on the screen. Marco Arment, developer of podcast player Overcast, has a detailed post breaking down the multiple problems with Apple's analog watch faces if you're curious about some of the items outside developers could address.

One sign that Apple Watch will move quicker than its iPhone counterpart is that it included third-party apps on day one and has been slightly ahead of the iPhone's software development process. But until Apple opens up watch face development, tweaking complications may be the best way for developers to get around the smartwatch's limitations.

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