Custom Apple Watch Faces

One thing that has been sorely missing with the Apple Watch is the ability to create custom watch faces. I’ve long thought that at the minimum Apple should make all the existing one themeable through something as simple as CSS, but of course, I’m just someone sitting in the peanut gallery and I have no idea how they work.

Steven Troughton-Smith decided to take this a step further and created a Github project named SpriteKitWatchFace that is a simple project to create a ‘fake’ Apple Watch watch face using Sprite Kit. You can see some of the examples in the feature image of this post.

David Smith, an iOS developer, used the SpriteKitWatchFace project and wrote up a post on how he used it to duplicate an iconic watch face and I loved his closing in reference to Apple’s marketing of the Apple Watch:

When Apple first introduced the Apple Watch in 2014 their tag line for the original version was “Apple’s Most Personal Device Ever”. And it’s true, the Apple Watch is profoundly personal, it sits next to your skin all day, literally listening to your heart beating. But it wasn’t until this week of perfecting my own personal watch face that I really felt like the watch on my wrist was truly mine.

That hits home for me. I don’t care if my phone looks like everyone else’s, but a watch is so personal I think it matters. At least to me, anyway. Hopefully, Apple will eventually make this easier for everyone that wants a custom face.