WFS 1.14.20 on a Wear OS 4 Emulator

Watch Face Studio
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I setup a Wear OS 4 emulator as explained on Android Developers. I did this to test my watch faces on Wear OS 4 after I migrated my watch face from 1.3.13 to 1.4.20. But it doesn’t seem to work properly at all.

I used one of the watch faces that come with WFS to demonstrate. When customizing the watch face on the emulator it seems the options just appear on a random order. The options don’t work as they should. The index of the face doesn’t change and only the minute hand changes its style. I’ve attached a video for demonstration.

I was thinking about updating all of my watch faces with WFS 1.4.20, but I’m not sure at the moment. Am I doing something wrong, or do watch faces made with 1.4.20 not work properly on Wear OS 4?

One more thing, do I have to update all of my watch faces (with WFS 1.4.20) until August 31? I’m asking because the min. Target API level will be 30 then.

Thanks a bunch in advance!

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The Watch Face Format is not fully supported by WFS 1.4.x right now. They still have to implement UserConfigurations  |  Android Developers but are not done yet. This means styles are kinda sorted randomly, you cannot reorder, color palettes cannot be named etc. I hope they will finish their implementation in a future release.

According to other forum users WFS 1.3.x already targets SDK level 30 and has 28 as min level (for Wear OS 2.x). So that should be no issue.

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Got it, thank you so much!

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Would you still recommend using 1.4.20, or should I stick to 1.3.13?

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I guess that depends on the type of face watch you are trying to build. If you need those styles I’d rather wait until WFS supports them properly.

Personally I have a very simple digital face watch made in WFS 1.4.20 in the Play Store right now. Some styling/layout options would be nice and I’d rather have color palette names instead of “1st option, 2nd option, 3rd option and so on”. But for that basic watch face it is good enough as it is.

Edit: Oh, don’t forget: watch faces made in WFS 1.4.x work on Wear OS 3 and newer only. So you will miss the majority of users still running Wear OS 2.

2 Likes
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You got a very good answer from @davidsung

When Wear 4 is released you should be able to use the end users settings for heart measurement and steps and those are the two current drawbacks (and end user complaints) with WFS 1.3.x and older. Keep that in mind

Ron
Samsung Developer Relations

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Thank you both for your explanations!!