To make it easy for people to build their own custom watch faces for their favourite Samsung Gear smartwatches and fitness trackers such as the Gear S, Gear S2, Gear S3, Gear Fit2, Gear Fit2 Pro, etc, Samsung released the Gear Watch Designer(GWD) tool over a year ago under Beta. Since then, Samsung has been pushing updates to the program to improve features and fix bugs along the way while adding support to new Samsung wearables as they get released. The most recent update to GWD was the 1.5.0 beta release which brought in support for the recently launched Gear Sport and Gear Fit2 Pro wearables.
At the recent Samsung Developer Conference 2017 which took place a couple of days ago, Samsung took time to talk about GWD and promote more developers to get into watchface making for its wearables. Samsung’s designer Hyeonju Lee hosted the discussion along with two speakers Melanie Lombardi of Echo Visuals, Inc and Christopher Shomo of Infinity watchfaces whose watchfaces are the most popular ones currently on the Galaxy Apps store. Lee mentioned that 8 out of 10 top watchface sellers on the store made their watchfaces with GWD while the rest went with other options such as Facer, Watchmaker PREMIUM, Mr Time Maker and Tizen Studio.
Christopher, who has over 200 watchfaces currently on the store shared some tips on design and marketing watchfaces to have a decent income from this niche. Melanie, on the other hand, shared details on the processes that help in making some really good watchfaces.
Hyeonju Lee also mentioned that the next release of GWD will bring in some really interesting features such as 3D watchfaces support and the ability to display News and Stock market information. Watch the full session below and get started with developing your own custom watchface by following the tutorial over here.
Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7s_sBOtgRE
