Android Wear 1.3 introduces interactive watch faces

Android Wear 1.3 gets support for interactive watch faces. For example, with a touch, parts of the watch face, such as the weather, or the agenda for that day, can be enlarged.

Google announces on the official Android blog that the update will roll out to all Android Wear devices in the coming weeks. As examples of the new interactive watch faces, Google lists the Bits app, Under Armor and Together. These are respectively a customizable dial with all kinds of extra info, a fitness app and a kind of messaging app especially for smartwatches.

Before update 1.3, developers could only develop static watch faces for Android Wear. Support for interactive watch faces was already in the Apple Watch, which gave the US company’s product an advantage over its Android counterparts. Previously, there were already Android Wear apps that supported interactivity in the watch face, but with the update from Google, that has now become native.