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Mobvoi watch faces return to the Play Store following mysterious disappearance
They're older and a little wiser now
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Mobvoi makes a lot of Wear OS smartwatches, and like any good watchmaker, it also produces a variety of watch faces that users can install to personalize their timepieces. Last month, however, on the eve of Halloween, all of the company's watch faces — and the developer account used to publish them — seem to have been purged from the Play Store entirely. Now it looks like most of them have returned to their rightful place on the Play Store's virtual shelves.
Fitbit makes it easier to track blood oxygen with new SpO2-monitoring watch face
Providing quick access to SpO2 levels and other health metrics
With the advent of the fitness-focused wearable, everyone suddenly became a lot more conscious of their health. Fitbit introduced blood oxygen saturation monitoring for many of its existing smartwatches earlier this year, and now the company is giving customers a new watch face to easily check SpO2 levels at a glance.
Customizable watch faces are an integral part of the smartwatch experience. What good is a digital display if you're not going to use it to make your watch look exactly like you want it to? That's why there are hundreds of designers making faces for every wearable platform, and apps such as Pujie Black that let you create your own. The popular app was previously restricted to Wear OS but is now also compatible with Tizen OS, namely Samsung's Galaxy Watch, Watch Active, and Gear Sport. Support for the Gear S3 is coming soon.
It may be the silliest idea to some, but it may be the most interesting idea to others. Wearable Widgets, an app that transforms your phone's widgets into Wear OS (né Android Wear) watch faces, has added support for complications. So instead of replacing your entire watch face with a widget, you can leave whichever design you like and choose a widget from your phone as a complication inside it. How well does it work? I tested it to find out.
Udell is a well-known Android developer, mostly thanks to Wearable Widgets. If you're getting ready for Google I/O 2018, or you're just looking for a fun Android Wear Wear OS watch face, Udell's new 'I/O 2018 Watch Face' is pretty great.
What's time but a series of building blocks of infinitesimally small moments? You change one block and the whole structure could be modified, you add and add and add more blocks, hoping the final result is beautiful and meaningful, and you look around at others' structures learning from them and sometimes envying or criticizing them. That's one philosophical way of introducing this new watch face by Tha PHLASH, Timecraft.
Out of all the watch maker applications on Android, Pujie Black is my favorite. I find the interface easier than WatchMaker, plus it's accessible on Android instead of requiring a web browser like Facer. I also love that I paid once for the app and I can get all of the community's creations for free and edit them to fit my personal needs. There's a learning curve to figuring out what everything does inside the app, but once you've got the hang of it, there are hundreds of things you can change to specifically tailor it to your preference. I personally like seeing my steps, the date, and PST timing (Artem's timezone) as the 3 Pujie indicators, and I love having a tap action to play/pause Pocket Casts specifically. It makes it easier to resume and pause listening to my podcasts from my watch without fiddling with my phone, watch apps, or any voice actions.
One of the best things about smartwatches is that they finally give the fashion-inclined the ability to switch out watch faces without buying another $300 bit of wrist jewelry. There have been attempts to create systems whereby end users could easily create their own digital watch faces ever since the original Pebble, with varrying degrees of success. Now Asus, which has already released dozens of custom watch faces for its ZenWatch and ZenWatch 2 customers, has created its own custom watch face maker app.
We've known that it's coming for about a month, and today Google has made good on those expectations. According to a post on the official Android blog, Android Wear will be getting a software update "in the coming weeks" that will enable interactive watch faces. These are essentially tiny apps/widgets built into a watch face design that let you do more than simply tell the time or check the weather. A sufficiently advanced face app could replace several individual Wear apps, or do away with the need to check for updates from a specific app.
Watch faces are a dime a dozen on the Play Store, or more accurately a few bucks each, so there's no shortage of choice when you want to make your wrist gadgetry look good. But if you're always aching for something new and slightly different, Animated Watch Faces might fit the bill.
How many times have you looked at your Android Wear watch while it booted and thought, "Gosh darn it, that's a rrrrreally cool animation right there!" If you love that boot sequence, you probably get a tickle every time your battery dies or your watch updates and you see it starting up again. Boot Watch Face eliminates those requirements by using the animation each time you turn your watch on. Neat!
There isn't a shortage of Tron-inspired watch faces for Android Wear with bright neon blue colors, but finding one that is customizable to different styles and watch shapes can be a bit difficult. Enter NAVI, from Tha PHLASH (lots of capslocking there), a cool watch design that hits all the right notes.
We're all looking forward to Google I/O. Some of us frequently check the official website to count the days until registrations are open, so we are familiar with the cool font and animations used for the event's hashtag and countdown. They're all about Material Design — layers, colors, shadows, FABs, and all the design elements that have populated our conscious and subconscious dreams for the past months.
Whether you are going out tonight on an expensive date or you've prepared the most romantic night-in for your significant other, here's a small added gesture you can use to persuade them of how much you love them. Put this watch face up on your Android Wear, take a picture and send it to your partner. Tell them you're counting the minutes until you see them, and every time you glance at your watch, you're reminded of how your heart beats for them.* Cheesy. But isn't the entire "holiday" built around just that?
A lot of you might like to follow the example of the esteemed Johnny Paycheck, and tell your boss to Take This Job and Shove It. Alas, if you want to keep eating and sleeping indoors, you'll simply have to take comfort in Alan Jackson's less confrontational message: It's Five O'clock Somewhere. But if you've got an Android Wear device, we've found a watch face that might just make your Shift Work (Kenny Chesney) more bearable by showing you exactly when you can start singing the 5:01 Blues with Merle Haggard.
You're not alone. We all feel the catrocious weight of our daily grind, from early meowning until late evening, and by the time the clock strikes a dozin' bells, we're ready to roll over on our work stations and catipulate. Evidence supporting:
DualBoot Games, the makers of the Live Wallpapers that our team had taken a shine to back in 2012-2013, have been in a deep slumber for many moons. But they have just risen up (the forced metaphors will make sense in a bit, trust me) and released, of all things, an Android Wear watch face: Celestial 3D.