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I enjoyed the surprise push notification from Apple this week that my watch had a new face available. That’s new!

Khaos Tian dug in, discovered that watchOS can now load watch faces dynamically from a bundle, and asked for an official watch face SDK.

I’ve wanted a watch face API ever since I started wearing it every day. I’ve struggled to see the value in watch apps, but I have a super clear vision for the watch face that I’d like to use, and I’d love to build it.

It’s easy to speculate that this is a sign of a beta test for something new that could arrive in this summer’s watchOS beta. Is Apple dogfooding the technology before rolling it out for developers? I’d say no for a couple of reasons.

First, this is a cool distribution technology, but if 3rd party watch faces ever become a thing, they won’t roll out like this. We already have a watchOS App Store.

Yes, as far as I know, this is the first we’ve heard of this “Argon” framework, but it’s no surprise that Apple has a framework for writing watch faces. They make many!

Second, Apple love to surprise developers at WWDC, and we’re only a few months (yes, five, but we’re closer to this year’s than last year’s!) from this year’s conference. If they were going to release a watch face SDK this year, it seems unlikely they’d spoil the surprise like this.

With all of that said, I’d love a watch face SDK, so I can build one that’s perfect for me. I’d dearly love for Apple to prove these words wrong come June. 🙏

Dave Verwer  

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And finally...

i won 😂