“I guess I’m known as that firmware-poking guy,” says Hamza Sood, the young hacker who most recently found a way to create and add custom watch faces to Apple Watch.
Cult of Mac chatted with the London-based 19-year-old via email to find out more about what makes him tick.
“I think my first venture into iPhone hacking was when the (iPhone) 4s came out,” Sood said. He only had an iPhone 4, but really wanted to try out Siri, Apple’s then-new personal digital assistant.
“I worked with Steven Troughton Smith,” said Sood, naming a well-known iPhone jailbreaker, “and a few other people to back-port it.” Ultimately, Sood helped the team fix a few issues, like the graphic drivers not loading, and was first to fully crack the iPhone authentication system.
When iOS 7 arrived on the scene, Sood jumped in with both feet and tackled how to make dynamic wallpaper plugins using his skills.
Sood likes to poke around in the code of current Apple devices for hints at what’s coming down the pike in terms of future devices.
“Before the 5s was announced I found a biometrics framework and slo-mo camera support,” he said.
As for the actual Apple Watch hack, Sood is understandably cagey about how he did it. He did tell us, though, that his exploit can go much further than simply custom watch faces.
“I’ve got code running inside Carousel,” he said, “which is kind of like the watchOS version of SpringBoard. It displays the home screen, watch faces, glances and notifications.”
With this access, Sood could theoretically modify most anything within the Apple Watch interface. That’s quite a bit of power to mess around with.
The Apple Watch simulator in XCode helped Sood do much of the work in developing the actual watch face.
“It sped things up a lot,” he said. “It would’ve been a real pain to have to transfer everything to the watch for every tiny change made; Apple Watch really can be slow at the best of times.”
Sood loves his Apple Watch as is, though. He might not want to hack the Apple Watch any further.
“I’ve been thinking about other demos and just generally what to do with this,” he said. “But honestly I love my watch so much that there’s nothing that I really want to change.”
