This is the custom watch face I created for my Galaxy 7 watch:
The 55 in yellow is my heart rate, the cyan 49% is of course the battery level, the day/date in pink and the steps in green. I’ve used very large characters everywhere to accommodate my 71 year-old eyes.
I also have a complication showing the stopwatch in orange text in the upper right. The hundredths of a second display after the decimal point falls off the screen, but that’s by design since hundredths is just a distraction. But strangely this number does not update as the stopwatch is running but updates only when you hit stop. What? How useless is that? I wanted to use this to track the duration of my trail running, but it needs to update continuously to be any use. This must be an oversight, right? I can put all kinds of esoteric stuff on the watch face such as acceleration, moon phase, sunrise, sunset, body composition, and more, but I can’t display a stopwatch ???
Of course I tried using the green running button on the watch, which gives me a screen that looks like this:
I can read the duration just fine, although again the hundredths of a second is a distraction. I’m often interested in my heart rate, which fortunately is displayed here, but alas it’s too small for me to read. I can barely read it if I stop my run and squint for a bit but I don’t want to do that. I can also read it if I have my reading glasses on, but that is uncomfortable, not to mention even dangerous while trail running. (The heart rate on my watch face is twice this size and I can easily read it without my reading glasses). Also occasionally I want to know the time of day, which is shown at the top in microscopic type. Frankly that’s so small I didn’t even know it was there until doing this screen capture. I guess the 20 somethings who are designing the watch can see this, but do they really like it this small? Perhaps they get extra style points for seeing how small they can make it. And BTW, I went to settings and selected the largest font size as well as bold, but it doesn’t help with this.
The watch is nice and I love being able to store music files and listen to them on my earbuds without having to lug my phone with me … but the main reason I bought it was for trail running and it doesn’t really show what I need.
I don’t know enough about Android programming to fix this kind of thing on my own, but could someone well versed in the art design an app that could do what I need? Or perhaps is there already such an app out there that I could download?
Is it likely that a future version of wear OS will fix the problems with the stop watch complication?