If there's one Apple Watch feature that some people have long cried out for, it's support for third-party watch faces, but it sounds like it's a feature that won't be coming to our wrists any time soon.
While some had hoped that Apple would add third-party watch face support to watchOS 10 when it was announced at WWDC on June 5, that didn't happen. And now in a new interview with a Swiss newspaper, Apple appears to have put the kibosh on the feature ever coming to its wearables.
Why is that? Apple says that you can't trust third-party watch faces to actually work.
Taking the worry out of wearables
In an interview with Tages-Anzeiger, spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple VPs Kevin Lynch and Deidre Caldbeck discussed the Apple watch and the lack of non-Apple watch faces.
The gist, it seems, is that Apple wants to be sure that the watch faces always work, no matter what. Apple sees the watch face as the Apple Watch's Home Screen, and users "don’t have to worry about the watch face still working when there’s a major watchOS update" if they install a future watchOS update. "We’ll take care of that," Caldbeck said.
Whether or not that's something that will satiate people calling for third-party Apple Watch face support remains to be seen, but it does seem like a flimsy argument. Apple could no doubt build an API that would handle all of the underpinnings of making the watch face work, ensuring that everything behaves as it should.
It would be interesting to hear what Apple Watch app developers have to say about the suggestion that they could break Apple Watches with their own watch faces, too.
Apple will no doubt argue that the best Apple Watch is one that can be relied on to work every time it's looked at.
