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Next up: custom faces for your Android smart watch

By Marcus Wong - on 21 Jul 2014, 2:51pm

Next up: custom faces for your Android smart watch

Image source: Mashable

Android Wear developers will soon be able to create custom smart watch faces, as Google has announced that they are currently hard at work developing an API that will let this happen. Because the watch face will be constantly interacting with the stream and be on pretty much all the time, special considerations will have to made so that the watch face will work across multiple devices, conserve battery, and display the user’s card stream nicely.

Icons for battery indicators and mute will have to be relocated, and the face will need to be rendered differently in ambient mode so while developers are already able to create their own watch faces (albeit with a lot of tweaking), Google’s Wayne Piekarski recommends not posting their designs to Google Play until a stable, published API is released, as the existing unpublished API may not be compatible with the next Android Wear release – Android L – which is only set for release later this year.

Piekarski thinks the custom watch API will arrive sooner rather than later though, as Google acknowledges that customization is what has has helped Android thrive. Some developers , like Nitrous Digital and Eric Petzel have already launched their watch face apps though,so it will be interesting to see how quickly these apps are updated to support Android L once it is officially released. 

Source: Mashable, Google + 

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