I recently bought the Galaxy Watch 7 Ultra by Samsung and I was informed by developers about some nexpected policy changes from Google, and that the SGW7 only supports WatchFaceFormat, and WatchFaceFormat does not support freemium apps.
Google says that it’s for “Performance and Quality standards” but they don’t offer any kind of assistance or support to the developers being affected.
This is absolutely horrible and I hope that Google fixes it because a lot developers are losing customers on on new watches and we the customers won’t be able to use the watchfaces that we paid for!
This needs to be fixed ASAP because everyone is affected by these policy changes that don’t offer any help or solution.
The most detailed explanation I’ve seen is the one from Facer at the link below (but the same considerations apply to WatchMaker and other third-party watch-face design apps). It sounds unlikely that any solution is forthcoming that would allow those apps’ watch faces to work on new Wear OS 5 watches.
Our best hope now is for Samsung to make WFS an adequate substitute, but there seems to be little effort in that direction. Simple, vital features are missing, such as expression tags for Compass and Barometer sensors. And there is apparently no plan to include them, at least during this year.
They abandoned Tizen, making all the watch faces on Tizen obsolete
They joined hands with Google and stopped distributing new Watchfaces on GalaxyStore, developers took time to get used to it and had to comply with all kinds of rules
They combined Google to create a new WFF standard to limit creativity and force developers to follow their framework
Yes, if they hadn’t abandoned Tizen, the WearOS world wouldn’t have been so chaotic, ffffffffcck
The situation is really bad, instead of improving on the experience that we’ve had they are limiting and creating new problems for all customers and developers that have been giving us more options all these years.
Well done Samsung I don’t see them don’t anything at all about this mess.
I don’t see them don’t anything at all about this mess.