Wear OS Watch Faces

I used to have a Fossil Gen 5 Android smartwatch, and I wanted to tinker with it. I was curious what it actually takes to build your own watch face, and what the Wear OS APIs expose to you, so I sat down and made one.

This is a pure experimentation project. I built an analog watch face in Kotlin for Wear OS and ran it on my Fossil Gen 5 Carlyle (the round one), mostly to explore the space: how the face gets drawn, what data and sensors you can pull in, and where the limits are. It scratched the “how does this work?” itch, which is usually why I start these things in the first place.

How you can use it

If you want to build your own watch face, the repo is a decent starting point. It is written in Kotlin, so if you have done any Android work you will feel at home, and I linked the references I learned from in the README. See the repo.