Face on/Face off
New faces and new ways to get them
LET’S MEET SOME new faces. Chronograph Pro includes a tachymeter with selectable intervals, has four complications slots, and looks really nice in darker hues. X–Large now includes a large complication to make it clever as well as big, Photos enables you to apply color filters to your images and the most colorful face of all, Pride, comes in new designs.
The most fun face–related feature in watch OS 7 is face sharing. This enables you to install watch faces from other people, and if you don’t have any other Apple
Watch users handy you can get shared faces from the App Store and from sites such as buddywatch.app. The quality varies, but there are some really beautiful, useful, and fun faces in the fast–growing collection.
It’s important to note that while any third– party can share an Apple Watch face, these
aren’t third–party Apple Watch faces. That sounds pedantic, we know, but every available face is based on the standard faces supplied by Apple and has the same design constraints, such as the number of shortcut slots.
To share your Apple Watch face, long– press on it. Your watch will move into face selection mode where you can swipe between your installed watch faces, but now there’s a little share icon in the lower left–hand corner. On Apple Watch, you share faces using the Messages app; on iPhone you can do so from the Watch app — simply tap Share, then choose an app to share from, such as Mail.
Installing a new face couldn’t be easier. Just tap the link and it will open in the Watch app on your iPhone; if you’re using your Apple Watch it’ll install directly onto the device. It works like any other face, so you can tweak it to suit your needs.
In a nice touch, your Apple Watch will tell you if the face that you’re installing includes any complications from apps you don’t currently have. You can then install the appropriate app(s) or continue with your own complications.