Does WFS offer any way to display compass information via a complication, or via a tag expression? I haven’t been able to find it.
I have the recent WFS (1.6.10) and a new Galaxy Watch 7 (paired with an S24U). The GW7 has several pre-installed watch faces with editable complications that have a Compass option as one of the available Basic Complication options. But when I create an editable complication in a WFS watch face and run it on my GW7, the Compass option does not show up among the selections on the watch. I’ve tried Short Text, Long Text, Range Value, Icon, and Small Image complications.
A tag expression for reading the compass data would be even better than a complication option (tags offer much more flexibility in how to display the data), but I can’t find that either. Third-party watch face design apps such as Watchmaker and Facer provided compass data as tag expressions for Galaxy watches up to the GW6; but those apps are no longer compatible with the GW series as of GW7.
Can anyone confirm whether the absence of an editable Compass complication choice from WFS faces on the GW7 is due to a bug or limitation of WFS? Or could it be instead that the GW7’s pre-installed faces offer the Compass complication only because those faces perhaps use the pre-WFF format?
Thanks, yes, I know how to set up a watch face icon to open the compass app. But I’d like to have the compass information on the watch face itself (just like it is on several of the pre-installed faces) so I can see it just by glancing at my wrist, without having to tap or swipe anything.
Not possible in WFS at the moment. If you search in the forum you can find some answers from Ron why not. That basically is because not all watches have a compass sensors and WFS goal is to be compatible with all brands, not just Samsung. At least I seem to recall something like this.
Official Samsung Watch Faces are made with Android Studio (lol)
But not all watches have accelerometers either, yet WFS has tags for accelerometer values. It also has a tag to say whether the device has an accelerometer or not, so the watch face can adapt and be compatible either way.
There’s no reason the same approach couldn’t be taken for compass tags. There’s nothing remotely impossible about it.
For sure is non sensical approach for us devs, but apparently it has sense for Samsung. Compass, like many other requests apparently basic from our point of view, were denied with such motivations, usually two: or because WFS is for all brands and has to be compatible with all devices or because of privacy concerns related to the complications provider.
But we already got a big improvement. Weather apparently is coming with the next release. This feature also was requested long time ago, so maybe next year there will be hope also for Compass… For now you can use Android Studios to implement it in your watchface…
I see. Well, that’s unfortunate. So Samsung has abruptly ended compatibility with 3rd-party watch face editors such as Watchmaker, and Samsung’s own WFS editor has the philosophy that its watch faces should limit all watches to the capabilities of the cheapest watches, for “compatibility”.
I considered using Android Studio, but that’s way too much trouble just to work around the lack of a simple [COMPASS] or [BAROMETER] tag in WFS. I appreciate the suggestion, though.
Has Samsung ever explained why an editable complication in a WFS watch face can’t select a Compass complication when running on the watch, even though it can select other device-specific complications on the watch, and even though pre-installed faces on the watch are able to select Compass for their editable complications?
Here a Samsung moderator, now retired, (unfortunately this forum has become also without a skilled moderator about WFS and Android) answered vaguely like I wrote in my previous post:
If you search through this forum you can find many post here and there about it.
As I mentioned in another post, also official Samsung watchfaces are made with Android Studio. So for now there is not another way. Let’s see what will be with the next version of WFS.
Thanks again for your reply! I did search the forum earlier and saw the vague references to “privacy concerns”, but that puzzles me just as much as Samsung’s “compatibility” rationale. How does privacy explain why, on the GW7, WFS faces have access to Barometer, Call History, and various health & exercise choices for editable complications, but not a Compass complication? And if there’s a privacy concern specifically about the Compass choice, why is that same Compass choice allowed for editable complications on the GW7’s pre-installed faces, but not the WFS faces?
Samsung seems to be reciting the words “compatibility” and “privacy” without explaining how those concerns have any bearing on the design choices in question.
Regarding the possibility of using Android Studio to bypass the limitations of WFS/WFF, does anyone know if that will still work for new Wear OS 5 watches such as the GW7? When I look at the Watch Face Sample in Android Studio, there’s a warning that says “As of July 10, 2024, watch faces must use the Watch Face Format in order to be installed on new watches that launch with Wear OS 5 pre-installed”.
So I don’t want to go to the trouble of writing a watch face in Android Studio only to find that I can’t install it on my watch.
I don’t know… probably just Google knows… but sometimes it seems that its left hand doesn’t know what the right end is doing. Anyway you can try on Android Studio to test such watchface on virtual device manager using Wear OS 5 SDK. I didn’t try yet.
