I’m a long time watchface designer from Facer and Watchmaker and because of recent policy changes (and a new smartwatch) I have now switched to WFS.
In order to get the watchfaces on my watch I created a Google Play developer account (I just never could get the Wifi sync to device to work). After creating my first watchface I thought it would be fun to share it so I made a listing for it.
Of course, there is a lot of red tape and steps to follow. Before release I need a closed beta testing with at least 12 testers.
If anyone is interested in this purely analog watch face, which features a classic pilot-inspired design with a rotating outer date ring, a precise moon phase complication, and a simulated power reserve indicator send me a PM with your Gmail address associated with your Google Play Store and I’ll add you to the list and send a link for the test. The more the merrier.
No DM on this Forum . Some Guys have tried to start groups . I have not bookmarked them . I am sure they will chip in here . Or we search for the previous topics .
Guys, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Google left the top sellers of watch faces, and they don’t care about your individual movements. You won’t be able to compete with the top sellers who don’t need to pass tests. Google absolutely unfriendly for new watch face designers right now. For each new job you will undergo testing for 14 days or more. The need for testing will remain with you FOREVER. If you think that over time Google will disable the need for testing for your account, you are mistaken. Google ignores the fact that a watch face developer and an indie developer are not the same thing. That a watch face developer needs to have an impressive portfolio with a large number of watch faces to start making money from it. According to our statistics, one out of 5 jobs will be successful. All other jobs are sent back for retesting. This is absurd, since our jobs are 100% complete and error-free. At the same time, they will let through obvious garbage from other developers, with two buttons in the interface.
I can tell you it’s not any better for those who were lucky enough to get in before the 20 tester standard. I am thankful for that as finally in this watch face game I managed to get an advantage after missing out on so many others. Other than that, having no place to showcase your work aside from social media groups absolutely sucks. Google seems to either pick faces in a dark room with a dart, or makes sure the “big guys” get placement on the Google Play Store. I have been lucky enough to have a couple of faces featured in “new and trending” on Google Play and let me tell you, that is the difference maker. it’s night and day results compared to slogging it out on social media. I personally have no trouble paying for advertising (if it works) on Google Play but after mucking about with the Ads console, there doesnt even seem to be a place to advertise Wear OS apps! They have made this process overly vague and obfuscated. I have asked around and not surprisingly, I can’t get any answers. This is a game of “learn by attrition” as for the most part, no one is going to help you with anything that could be seen as a competitive advantage over the other guy. Best practice now should just be to look at it as a hobby.
I figured it out:
I started the Google Group and I can just refer to it if people want to use my watchfaces and basically never publish them on Google Play unless a watchface gets enough tester. I was going to publish them for free anyway. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the actual sharing, the fun for me is creating them.
Funnily enough I got a message from Facer today “Exciting news! We are working with google to enable watchfaces for new watches too”.
That would be a dilemma for me: Facer makes it easy to share watchfaces but I find the resolution they use limiting and sometimes complicated watchfaces move really choppily. And wouldn’t they basically own the faces I make?
Don’t worry about Facer, even if they can weather this OS 5 debacle, they’ll still never make 99.9% of us partners anyway. That ship sailed long, long ago. I had noticed in the last couple of years of my time in Facer that new partners seemingly just came out of nowhere and by coincidence, they seemed to have some level of success in Samsung or Google Play prior to that.
I suppose they own it in the sense that if you stop paying for Facer Creator, you would lose all work completed (coded) work. You still own your art work etc. though. I mean WFS is not much different; you are able to save a working file of your own but who is to say in 3, 4, 5 years, you would even be able to use that file on whatever new version of Wear OS. I always hope I could be on a platform like Facer because they deal with all the backend stuff and they make sure that older versions of faces made on Facer would still function in new versions of Facer well into the future. (until Wear OS 5 came along of course )
Now losing Watchmaker really stings. I could do basically anything I could think of with the LUA scripting. And no matter what I threw at it the watchfaces worked smoothly. We shall see how this works out.
I know some one who has had a few bucks out of TS . They were in there Early Days . I had a little look at the platform and I could not find a way to work on stuff like Pendulums so I gave up . I have no ambition to make any money ( obviously ) from this Game . Just a Hobby for me .
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Peter it seems TS say they support Pixel3 but in reality there is no App on the Google store for it . Some might call that a Lie . Apparently the trick with a stalled Publication it to take it down and Republish it . Good luck .
I’m one of the lucky ones who signed up before the 20 tester rule was enforced. Two free watch faces with 50 active users combined (with zero promotion on social media or anywhere else). Basically, I uploaded my watch faces to the Play Store so I can share them with friends without the sideload hassle.
I have no idea how you can turn it into a profession instead of just a hobby. The entire store is flooded with low-quality crap offered at outrageous prices. The curated Play Store pages are filled with the same handful of developers who put more effort into their stock picture Photoshop template than the quality of the watch face itself.
Even worse is the lack of communication with Wear OS developers. By chance, I discovered the new version 3 of the Watch Face Format XML, which is documented on Google’s developer pages. When Wear OS 5.1 was rolled out on my Pixel Watch 2, I tested the new WFF features and tried to upload an update to the Play Store.
Watch faces using the SDK 35 (for Wear OS 5.1 and WFF version 3) cannot be uploaded to the Play Store right now. When will it be possible? No idea. I can only try to upload my aab file regularly and see if it is supported in the meantime.
funny thing is, at anytime Google can turn around and make the 20 tester rule for all developers and that would be that. I never feel lucky about anything in Google Play because who knows when it will change in an instant. I do feel your sentiment about the Play Store and what is up there being “curated”. It appears as if over time, even the customers have been conditioned to buy simple garbage at completely ridiculous prices in some instances.
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