Last week we linked to Marco Arment’s article critiquing Apple’s watch faces and calling for Apple to open up watch face design and development to third parties. By the next day, Steve Troughton-Smith had an Xcode project up and running that uses SpriteKit to simulate custom watch faces. Troughton-Smith posted pictures of the watch faces he created on Twitter, which drew a lot of interest from other developers.

Troughton-Smith uploaded his watch face project to GitHub, and in the days that followed, developers, including David Smith, who’s been making Apple Watch apps for his health and fitness apps since the Series 0 was introduced, began playing with Troughton-Smith’s code. Writing about the experience on his website Smith said:

There is something delightful about solving a problem that is superficially so simple and constrained. The constraint leads to lots of opportunities for creative thinking. Ultimately you just need to communicate the time but how you do that can take countless different forms. It reminds me of the various ‘UI Playgrounds’ that have existed in app design. For a while it was twitter clients, then podcast players and weather apps.

I spent the weekend following along as Troughton-Smith, Smith, and others designed all manner of personalized watch faces. The experience reminds me of the flurry of activity and excitement during the first months after the iPhone was released when developers reverse-engineered Apple’s APIs to create the first jailbroken apps even before there was an App Store. Let’s hope that history repeats itself and Apple opens up watch face development to third parties like it did with apps.

Below and after the break, we’ve collected tweets following Troughton-Smith’s work and showing off some of the designs that have been created over the past several days.

I’m really glad that this year there’s finally some pushback against the built-in watchOS faces. They’re not enough. They’ve never been enough. Whether you prefer digital or analog time, the best of the current watchOS faces are merely ‘bearable’, not ‘great’ https://t.co/GmrFmMmb3Y — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 9, 2018

Apple Watch faces are generally just SpriteKit scenes, or fairly-simple UIKit layouts; I’d love to see some third-parties actually design & build a few — SpriteKit is easy to prototype with on a Mac. Show Apple what they’re missing out on — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 9, 2018

I found a nasty way to remove the digital time label in a fullscreen WatchKit app, so now I can make beautiful watch faces 😜 pic.twitter.com/YSdmV75ySp — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 10, 2018

As so many people were asking, I put my sample Apple Watch ‘face’ project on GitHub. If you want to use this as a jumping off point to prototype your own Watch faces, go nuts! https://t.co/sQu4UQ9WEy pic.twitter.com/OeogH3bFll — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 10, 2018

In the spirit of seeing all these cool custom watch faces I give you binary watch face! pic.twitter.com/iwMMXrSBr5 — Aaron (@iosaaron) October 11, 2018

LOL I was getting incredibly frustrated with math trying to make edge-to-edge tick marks look right, but turns out real watch makers just say “fk it I’m done” instead and stop where I am now pic.twitter.com/pIppQA8I7g — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 11, 2018

Here is another watch face I’m working on, this time for when I feel fancy. Inspired by the Nomos Metro line. pic.twitter.com/k8C5QlVRwr — David Smith (@_DavidSmith) October 12, 2018

I collected a few of my thoughts and experiences about experimenting with custom watchOS faces this week. The process has been both tremendously fun and enlightening. https://t.co/yG8yyk0mH1 My thanks to @stroughtonsmith for the initial push. pic.twitter.com/qWJU066Gt2 — David Smith (@_DavidSmith) October 12, 2018

“But you’re just copying the Hermès face!” — yes, all of these clearly scream ‘Hermès’ 😛 And iOS is a PalmOS clone, too, you know pic.twitter.com/AWKzSlKKJT — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 13, 2018

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1051206536985542661

Updated my fork with these two https://t.co/r6cEshqEev pic.twitter.com/QkdZT207SF — Wu Tian (@Naituw) October 13, 2018

I think @stroughtonsmith is on to something with these custom Apple Watch faces! Never even used with Xcode before, but a few mins later and I adore this face on my Series 3! pic.twitter.com/EoVmkxMnXk — Matt Hunt (@hellomatt) October 13, 2018

A slightly different complication style for the inner side of a watch face & San Francisco’s alternative number glyphs. Regular complications could still show up at the edges of the watch face: pic.twitter.com/KTjZBOcOAj — Vidit Bhargava (@viditb) October 13, 2018

One of the joys of having a system with 69,120 permutations is hitting the ‘random’ button a few times and seeing what it spits out. Any of these do it for you? https://t.co/sQu4UQ9WEy pic.twitter.com/Sj8dVOKsd6 — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 14, 2018

The world’s least legible watch face. Though it does rather struggle with the top of each hour. pic.twitter.com/8gUIku1ooq — David Smith (@_DavidSmith) October 14, 2018

Never used Xcode, never coded something for iOS – but the beauty of @stroughtonsmith watch faces brought me over the edge. On to some date adding… pic.twitter.com/y69eEhl8fx — Yves Luther (@yves_io) October 14, 2018

@stroughtonsmith This would be a really great ad for sure pic.twitter.com/3ZDGGivjQo — Zach (@zmknox) October 14, 2018

Thanks to you @stroughtonsmith, I can’t stop working on cloning my favorite watch faces to my Apple Watch 😂 pic.twitter.com/F0Mrc0yZ8V — Cosmo — Devran Uenal (@maccosmo) October 14, 2018

So @stroughtonsmith’s Apple Watch faces are cool but nothing beats the aesthetics and readability of the Unix timestamp. pic.twitter.com/0J9baXbVK1 — AppleBetas (@AppleBetasDev) October 15, 2018

Companion app for @stroughtonsmith’s watch face app. Design is still a work in progress. pic.twitter.com/Qk2gz2vzEJ — Joseph Shenton (@notjosephs) October 15, 2018