One of the historic demands the Apple Watchers community makes of Apple is custom clockology faces and now with clockology always on display is possible to change it also thanks to clockology beta.
Every year the company integrates some watchfaces made by her. Developers cannot create custom watch faces other than modify existing ones.
How starts the clockology faces story
A lack that becomes heavier every year. Yet Apple, if it wanted, could integrate an ad hoc framework, capable of managing complications and low energy consumption. It could also make some money as the watch faces could be sold on the App Store.
To date, all this is not yet possible, despite the fact that the computing power is now sufficient for this purpose. If you want to experience the thrill of custom dials, I would like to point out one of the apps of the moment: clockology faces.
How the clockology always on display works
The app allows you to create custom watch faces or upload those created by the community and insert them into your Apple Watch. There are many groups on Telegram, Facebook and other social networks where you can find watch faces for clockology always on display.
But let’s see how it works. First you need to install the app from the App Store. This will have a version for iPhone (or iPad) where you can manage the watch faces and a companion for Apple Watch where you can receive the watch clockology always on display.
These must be downloaded and placed in the clockology always on display folder that will be created on your iCloud Drive. Therefore, when you want to insert a new watch face in the app, you will have to drag it to the folder on iCloud Drive.
How to upload a face
To load the watchface into your Apple Watch do the following:
Open the app on the Apple Watch and keep it active
Open the app on the iPhone (or iPad) and press and hold on one of the watch faces you want to load on the Apple Watch
In the menu that appears there will be the item “Synchronize Clock”
The watchface ends up on the Apple Watch
What to do if the watchfaces do not synchronize
The clockology beta
It may happen that the “Synchronize clockology beta” item does not appear. If this happens, you will need the activator. It is a watchface created for clockology beta testers that enables the use of the app.
Even if your version of clockology beta is not in beta, it will still activate it for you. Find the activator in this link. Just move it to the Clockology folder on iCloud Drive and activate it from the iPhone app as a common watchface.
Clockology works from watchOS 6 and above. As you can imagine, it does not install native watchface on your Apple Watch. This is the big limitation of the whole system, because Apple doesn’t allow you to create custom watchfaces.
In practice, Clockology behaves like a common third-party app. It is a kind of simulator to understand the potential of your watch if customized watchfaces arrive. The creativity of the community is huge. You could have really well done dials.
A trick to leave the clockology faces for longer
To have the custom watch clockology faces on your wrist for as long as possible, there is only one trick to use: go directly to the Apple Watch in Settings> General> Go back to the watch clockology faces and select “After an hour”. In doing so, the customized dial remains in the background as long as you check the time at least once an hour. If you don’t, it will revert to the original dial.
In addition, there are other cases in which the custom dial could disappear: in the case of notifications that require action and if you use apps from the iPhone that open the associated version on the smartwatch, such as the music player or maps.
Also consider that it works like all other third-party apps, so it’s not good if you use the Always On function active, because when it ends in the background, the digital clock appears as it appears when using all other third-party apps.
The app remains an interesting experiment that opens a window into the eventuality in which Apple decides to open to customizable clockology always on display. A taste of a feature that I hope will arrive sooner or later in mean time you can change face and band watch.