Wear OS 4 to get a fall release and new Wear OS Watch Face Format with improved creation tools

Google made a ton of exciting announcements during its I/O 2023 opening keynote today. In addition to revealing the highly-anticipated Pixel Fold, Pixel Tablet, and Pixel 7a, the company talked about a couple of new Android features for developers, gave us an update on Android for cars, and shared some new Google Home updates. But that's not all; Google's Bjorn Kilburn, GM & Senior Director for Wear OS, also shed light on a few new features coming to the software platform for smartwatches.

A simpler way to create and maintain watch faces

The Watch Face Format is inarguably the most noteworthy announcement Kilburn made on the first day of the developer conference. Developed in partnership with Samsung, the new declarative XML format aims to give developers an easy way to design and maintain Wear OS watch faces. The tool will help developers customize the appearance and behavior of watch faces without involving any executable code. It won't require embedding code in watch face APKs either, depending solely on the Wear OS platform to take care of the logic needed to render the watch face. As a result, developers won't have to worry about optimizing the performance or battery impact of their watch faces.

Watch faces developed using the Watch Face Format will also require less maintenance and fewer updates than the ones built using the Jetpack Watch Face library. For instance, developers won't have to regularly update watch faces to benefit from improvements in performance or battery consumption or to get the latest bug fixes.

The Watch Face Format is available to use starting today, and you can use it to create a variety of watch faces, including basic analog and digital watch faces, watch faces with complications, customizable watch faces, and more.

The Watch Face Format also includes a native editor that will let end users customize watch faces to their liking. The editor will support all watch faces made using the Watch Face Format, so developers won't have to build their own from scratch, and users will have an easier time customizing watch faces.

To make designing watch faces easier for the average user, Samsung has also released an update for its Watch Face Studio tool. Instead of writing XML to design a watch face, it gives users access to simple tools to create watch faces without prior coding experience.

New features in Wear OS apps

Along with the Watch Face Format, Kilburn announced a couple of new features for Wear OS apps that will soon roll out to users. These include new controls on the Google Home app to check Nest doorbell notifications on a Wear OS smartwatch and remotely unlock doors. Gmail and Google Calendar will also get Wear OS apps later this year, letting users quickly respond to emails, check their schedule, view and RSVP to events, and update task statuses.

Third-party Wear OS apps, like WhatsApp and Spotify, will also get new features to let users start conversations, reply to messages by voice, answer calls, play new episodes of podcasts, access curated lineups of music, and more. Wear OS will also get a new Peloton tile to help users track their workout streak.

The next evolution of Wear OS

In an accompanying blog post, Kilburn also confirmed that Google will roll out the next iteration of Wear OS later this year. While we don't know much about Wear OS 4 at the moment, we can confirm that it will offer native support for watch faces created using the new Watch Face Format and Samsung's Watch Face Studio. This means that watch faces made in the latest version of Watch Face Studio will use the Watch Face Format by default on Wear OS 4 smartwatches.

We expect Google to share more details about the next Wear OS update in the coming months, which will power all the best smartwatches, so stay tuned to our coverage if you want to be among the first to learn more about it.