A high-level Apple exec recently answered a question that bugs many Apple Watch users: Why aren’t third-party watch faces allowed?
It comes down to the company not allowing the wearable’s all-important home screen to be replaced by a non-Apple alternative that might not prove as reliable.
Third-party Apple Watch faces are verboten
Apple allows third-party applications on Apple Watch, adding to the wearable’s capabilities just as apps do on iPhone. And that’s not the only customization available to Apple Watch owners. Complications on the Apple Watch face can show information pulled from non-Apple apps.
Plus, users already can choose from dozens of Apple Watch faces, all developed by Apple. And it’s apparently going to stay that way. The recently announced watchOS 10 certainly doesn’t make the change.
When Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger asked Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, about the possibility of third-party watch faces, he threw cold water on the idea.
Translated from the interview’s original German by 9to5mac, Lynch pointed out that the Apple Watch face serves as the home screen of the device. And Apple wants to ensure that users “don’t have to worry about the watch face still working when there’s a major watchOS update. We’ll take care of that.”
To his point, suppose a user installed a third-party Apple Watch face that wasn’t compatible with watchOS 10 and then they upgraded to that operating system. The software would crash and take them to the device’s home screen — that third-party Apple Watch face. This would again crash and then reload the incompatible watch face. Only to crash yet again. Repeat this endlessly.
Also, consider that Apple won’t let users change the Home screen of an iPhone or iPad, either.
While watchOS 10 doesn’t allow third-party watch faces, it does add support for widgets, though users will need to spin the Digital Crown to show them.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
