Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Google could make it easier to set watch faces from your phone (APK teardown)

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Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

TL;DR

  • Google could make it easier to set a Wear OS watch face from your smartphone.
  • The company could offer a “set as watch face” button after you install a watch face via the Play Store.
  • This is a major improvement over the current toggle to automatically set a newly installed watch face.

Changing Wear OS watch faces is pretty easy, and you can do it via your smartwatch or a companion app. The Play Store also lets you switch to the newest installed watch face, but this functionality is getting a major boost.

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An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

We dug into the latest version of the Google Play Store (version 43.9.17-31) and discovered that the store could offer a “set as watch face” button after you install a watch face via your phone. We were able to activate the button, but it doesn’t work properly right now. Check out the screenshots below.

This is a major improvement over the Play Store on Wear OS, which offers a toggle to automatically set the watch face after it’s installed. That’s not ideal as you might want to install a watch face and only try it later. So being able to tap the “set as watch face” button via the Play Store on your phone would give you more control in this regard.

This button would also be useful if you’d like to change to a new watch face, but your wearable isn’t close by (e.g., charging or in your bag). So we hope Google brings this feature to the Play Store sooner rather than later.

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