Since this definitely costs Google a lot of missed sales revenue, it probably just has to reach the right desk for someone to look in to and solve it.
Any idea which doors to start kicking down? This must have been a discussion on here previously aswell?
Unfortunately, no. I’m not really sure at this point where the appropriate place to report such things would be. Google has become such a big company that at this point it kind of feels like it would be impossible to get to talk to a real person unless you were some big corporate partner or something like that. 
Hello. The whole problem seems to be that the app doesn’t automatically appear on the watch screen after installation. There are people who do not know their watches and do not know where to look for the installed program. In turn, the companion app opens a refund link on the watch. No way to quickly and easily install the watch screen. If you don’t know what’s going on and where to look, all that’s left is the refund link.
What do you mean when you say “refund link”? When I tested my companion app, if I press the button to send the install link to the watch, it shows the “Install” button on the watch, but if the watch is already installed, it shows the “Uninstall” button on the watch. However, I have only tested this with free watch faces so far. Does the “refund link” only show up with paid watch faces?
That’s right. And nothing about how to open the program.
Here is the problem (in my opinion):
when watchface is installed - nothing happens on the watch.
User has to go into wearable watch app on the phone, then go to “downloaded” then tap on new watchface and only then the watchface is shown on the watch.
Most users, I guarantee, do not know it.
I’m not a watchface seller but part of my job is tech support and you wouldn’t believe how dumb many people are…
Although this is not about being dumb, it’s expected to see the new watchface on the watch after buying it.
I agree with you that currently the process is not at all intuitive. And, there are certainly users out there that will not be able to muddle through the process of installing faces without some (or a lot) of help.
For this very reason, I decided to try my hand at using the commonly stigmatized “companion app” as a way to try and ease users through the less than intuitive installation process. I have not yet collected enough data to prove whether or not this approach could help prevent high refund rates, but the feedback I have received from a few people I’ve asked to test the companion app has been positive.
From my experience, I would also like to add that there are quite a few users who purchase a watch face on a completely different account than the one their watch is connected to. Such users, if they don’t reach out to the developer, often have no idea what happened or why the purchased watch face doesn’t appear on their watch.
Here’s one I just got. I don’t understand why Google can’t just redesign this so that the customer doesn’t have to scroll down to see that it IS compatible with their Wear OS device!!! I would think that Google has some pretty good UI designers…
Considering how cheap and easy this would be to fix, the problem is that it hasn’t reached their attention.
There are some new monopoly laws applying for the playstore now ( Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge - The Verge), so I think they’ll have their hands full with that for a while, but after that, we need to grab someones attention. When we are loosing money on this, they are too.
That said, these new laws actually do open the door for a separate watch face app store, should someone have the skill and time to develop something of the such.
I would guess they let AI to make it
Yeah that’s probably true. Soon Google will be nothing but a giant AI machine with just a CEO.
