Google says it'll allow developers to customize the faces of Android-based smart watches, officially - developers have already worked around the Android Wear platform's build to craft custom watch faces, but Google has asked for a stay in the flood of third-party designs until official support has been rolled out.
While developers had been anxious to get their hands on the Wear software development kit (SDK) and consumer have been just as enthused to get it on their wrists, the newly released software has already experience significant bugs. An apparent problem with the SDK's digital rights management (DRM) render many premium apps unusable, which was likely a contributing factor to Google's request that watch face modification wait until it's officially supported.
Wayne Piekarski, Senior Developer Advocate of Android and Wearables at Google, warned that the custom watch faces were tied to a number of elements of context streams, which are used to serve data to wearables.
"[Custom watch faces] have some special considerations due to interactions with the stream and always-on ambient mode -- including using a shorter peek card, moving the status indicators for battery and mute, and rendering the faces differently in ambient mode. Right now, without an official API, making a really great watch face currently takes a fair bit of tweaking," stated Piekarski.
Piekarski praised Android's openness and said developers using the Wear platform will be to achieve the same degree of customization on the Wear platform, though he said he expected the freedom and flexibility in development for wearables to come in the fall of 2014.
While Google has discouraged the use of workarounds used to create custom watch faces, it had to encourage the use of an alternative route to help developers get around a DRM issue that has plagued the Wear platforms small collection of paid apps.
"We're working to make this easier for you in the future, and we apologize for the inconvenience," said Google of the DRM issue.
Google didn't set a timetable for the release of a fix for the DRM issue. But with Piekarski stating that custom watch faces will be officially support when the Wear platform is updated in conjunction with Android L, an official DRM fix may arrive at the same time.
