Third-party faces might be more of a curse than a blessing for Apple Watch<article>
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<p>When Apple released the first developer preview of
watchOS 4.3.1 last week, the biggest news was that support for first-gen apps will be going away in the fifth version of Apple’s wrist-sized operating system. That’s not likely to affect many apps or users, but it does signal that Apple is developing its wearable platform at a blistering pace, with another round of new APIs and frameworks surely on deck for watchOS 5.</p><p>It was reported over the weekend that one of those new APIs might be third-party watch faces, a feature that Apple Watch users have wanted since day one. Hidden in the code for watchOS 4.3.1, <a href="
https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/14/watchos-4-3-1-suggests-future-support-for-third-party-watch-faces/" rel="nofollow">9to5Mac found[/url] a reference to a placeholder for “3rd part face config bundle generation” in Apple’s existing NanoTimeKit, which the site interpreted as a sign that Apple would finally loosen its grip on watch faces. That might not be the case, however. As longtime Apple developer <a href="
https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/985819954137182208" rel="nofollow">Steve Troughton-Smith points out on Twitter[/url], Apple could simply be referring to third-party complications with this log message, as the watchOS SDK <a href="
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/clockkit/adding_complications_to_the_gallery" rel="nofollow">already allows bundling[/url] for use across a variety of watch faces.</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/3268886/wearables/third-party-faces-apple-watch.html#jump">To read this article in full, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>
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Third-party faces might be more of a curse than a blessing for Apple Watch
