Wear OS Custom Tiles soon – Watch Out Apple Watch Faces

This is one of my little bugbears with Wear OS and Watch OS.

It’s the ability to have more scope to curate your own watch face with widget-cum-data field snippets of information.

Google doesn’t do it well, Apple doesn’t do it well on the Apple Watch, and Garmin had it 99% covered a couple of years back.

New Wear OS feature

Information on the Android developer site shows that Google already has released early-stage functionality with online slots of newly announced functionality to help developers achieve what has for so long been lacking. Yes, custom tile creation seems to be on target for a Q2.2021 release. I suspect this will coincide with a much-awaited new chunk of features and, finally, more powerful hardware from a range of manufacturers making further use of the faster, new(ish) SnapDragon 4100/4100+processors.

Tiles are quick-access features designed to meet immediate, often repeated and straightforward needs to deliver apparently straightforward functionality. Developers are specifically guided away from turning them into countdown-type features as they otherwise become a quick way to deplete precious battery resources.

It’s easy to look at Garmin and see how widgets like the ABC on the Garmin Enduro, below, deliver near-perfect functional solutions to real-world problems for activity/sports apps. Imagine these kinds of abilities to augment the Suunto 7 experience…just sayin’