TL;DR
- Samsung’s One UI 8 Watch software appears to be working on some new options for watch faces.
- Users should be able to set favorite faces and then randomize which is active.
- Samsung is also working on a system to recommend new watch faces based on those favorites.
We’ve got a millions reasons to love smartwatches, from being able to run helpful apps right on our wrists to the way they can keep us in touch with the world even when we don’t have our phones. But there’s also a big customization factor that’s part of the appeal, and beyond just having our choice from plenty of colorful bands, changing up the wearable’s look is as easy as just loading a new watch face. If you like nothing more than keeping your smartwatch looking fresh, we’ve got one development from Samsung that you’re going to want to pay close attention to.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Samsung’s upcoming One UI 8 Watch software has leaked, and we’ve already been digging through it to get an early look at some of the more interesting changes. This time around, we’re looking at the platform’s SecClockWorkSysUI package (just rolls off the tongue), and in version 4.0.57 we see some new text strings that sure seem to reference watch face randomization:
Code
<string name="wfp_show_watch_face_recommend_on_favorites">Show watch face recommend based on your favorites</string>
<string name="wfp_shuffle_watch_faces">Shuffle watch face</string>
<string name="wfp_recommend_wf">Recommend watch face</string>
<string name="wfp_recommended_description">Similar style to the watch face you're using</string>
<string name="wfp_set_watch_face_randomly">Set watch face randomly picked from your favourites</string>
<string name="wfp_more_than_one_favorite_watch_faces">To shuffle your watch faces, you need more than 1 favorite watch faces</string>Based on what we can observe here, it sounds like users who have two or more watch faces saved as favorites will be able to randomly select one of them to be set at the active face. There’s also parts of a framework here to recommend new watch face options based on those in your favorites, helping you to expand your collection a little.
What we haven’t seen, though, and where our thoughts immediately go when we start daydreaming about using a feature like this, is any sign yet of a way to automate that randomization process — waking up each morning to a new watch face. We’ve heard about users trying stuff like that on the phone side before, whether through Bixby automations or an app like Tasker, but nothing like a solution on the watch end.
That said, the nice thing about upcoming features is that nothing’s set in stone just yet, and for all we know some kind of automatics option is next on Samsung’s list of priorities. We’ll be keeping an eye out for further One UI 8 Watch leaks to see if we’re able to spot any additional progress.
