Watch Faces
The first thing to note for watch faces in watchOS 10 is that you can no longer swipe from the edge of your screen to switch between them. Instead, you now need to first tap and hold to enter the edit view for watch faces, at which point you can switch to a different face and then tap to select it. I’m still not quite used to this change, but I think it’s the right move either way. I mostly only used the edge-swipe to get back to my main watch face whenever an accidental gesture changed it.
One of the most exciting things about the Smart Stack is that it unburdens the watch face from being the only avenue for customization and quick access to information on watchOS. Now that a quick swipe up or a spin of the Digital Crown can reveal a host of information and utility, the pressure is off for every watch face to support advanced features like complications.
I know that that pressure has never really stopped Apple from doing what it wants on watch faces, but for more advanced Apple Watch users, it always made most of the faces feel disqualified before they even had a chance. I certainly have a long history of criticizing watch faces for this very reason. Choosing a watch face with no or very few complications meant cutting yourself off from a significant amount of features on your Apple Watch.
The Smart Stack releases this tension. For the first time I feel free to experiment with low-utility watch faces, because even greater utility than complications ever granted is very easily accessible.
Obviously, complications still have a leg up for certain use cases due to their showing information with zero taps rather than first requiring a user interaction, but that now feels like a more scoped use case. Rather than deciding between having any access to easily accessible data from apps, you’re now just deciding on your willingness to interact with your device before seeing that data. If you need instantly glanceable info, there are tons of watch faces with complications. If you are okay with first spinning the Digital Crown before getting to that same info (and much more), you can now use any watch face you please. This is a far more reasonable set of tradeoffs to consider than it was before.
With all that in mind, let’s take our usual look at this year’s new watch faces.
Palette
There’s not too much to say about Palette. It’s a perfectly nice watch face which fits comfortably into the increasingly packed category of simple, colorful faces. Palette has four corner complications, and includes a vast array of colorization choices. The strongest advantage Palette holds over existing color-based watch faces is its nice effect when the always-on display is dimmed. Palette features multiple regions of color, each of which follows one of the hands around the watch face. When dimmed, the second hand’s colors disappear and leave behind a very nice sweeping gradient which goes from black to saturated as it catches up with the hour and minute hands. This effect is similar to the Gradient face’s dimmed mode, but I find Palette’s version more pleasing.
Snoopy
Finally, the main event. I’m as surprised to be writing this as any long-time followers of my watchOS reviews will be to read it, but I love the Snoopy watch face. I have been using it as my daily-driver face for nearly four months now, and I’m still not sick of it. This watch face is an absolute triumph of whimsical, amusing design.
The Snoopy watch face consists of two animated characters, Snoopy and Woodstock, from the Peanuts comic strip. Over the course of each day, whenever you raise your wrist, you’ll find Snoopy (and often, though not always, Woodstock) engaging in some form of shenanigans on your watch face. Amazingly, these characters will actively interact with the hour and minute hands on the watch face, no matter what time of day it may be. At midnight, Snoopy might slide down the hands like they’re a fire pole. Around the 15th or 45th minute of any given hour, you may find him napping on the minute hand.
Increasing the fun and intrigue is the fact that the animations can even depend on the weather, the current season, or what activity you’re currently doing. Going for swim? You may find Snoopy surfing a wave on your watch face. Raining outside? Snoopy’s popping open his umbrella. Fall has arrived? Snoopy is raking together a leaf pile.
There are at least 148 unique animations for this watch face, according to a fascinating inside look that GQ managed to land. That article also described the engineering feats it took to bring this watch face to life:
If you’re going to the effort of sketching out Snoopy as he rides his kibble bowl down the minute hand, that helter-skelter-style joyride needs to have the opportunity to show up more than once an hour. So Apple’s engineers created a whole scene layout engine that can rotate certain clips by six degrees every minute, as well as a Snoopy decision engine that figures out the optimal time to showcase them without too much repetition.
Excellent. And in practice, they nailed this. Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll just look at a bunch of Snoopy animations in a row, and there is almost never a duplicate within those short timespans. Even after four months I don’t think I’ve seen all the tricks Snoopy has up his sleeves — just last week I saw at least two or three animations that I had never witnessed before (they were fall-based, so I think he’s still holding back some seasonal fun).
Adding even more fun to the equation is the watch face’s default “Sunday Surprise” color scheme. There isn’t much to the surprise (I had hoped for custom Sunday-only animations, but it’s more just charming than particularly surprising), but if you really don’t want it spoiled then you should skip the next paragraph.
While you can manually choose a colored background for the Snoopy face to hold at all times, if you leave it on Sunday Surprise then the background will be gray. There is also a dotted texture to it, making it appear like the newspapers that Peanuts was originally printed on. The Sunday Surprise is a tribute to Sunday comics, in which newspapers print a full-color comics section on Sundays. As such, every Sunday the Snoopy face will spend the day showing a different colorful background each time you raise your wrist.
Despite the relative subtlety of the Sunday Surprise, I’ve grown fond of it anyway. Maybe it’s the nature of my remote job making the days sort of blend together, but the Sunday Surprise always gives me a pleasant reminder that another week has begun. I smile every week the first time I see it on my wrist.
Unsurprisingly given the complex animations at play, the Snoopy watch face includes no complication slots. Last year this would have frustrated me, and I do still slightly wish that they’d managed to include one or two in the top corners (where the animations rarely make contact). That said, in the new age of the Smart Stack, this feels more like a minor inconvenience than a disqualifying factor.
I encourage everyone to at least give the Snoopy watch face a shot. I did so with little expectation that I’d keep it going forward, and I was tremendously surprised by how much I enjoyed it. There’s just something so very satisfying about these animations. After learning how much engineering effort went into them, I get where that satisfaction is coming from.