Apple let you choose between 20 and 40 watchface types, depending on how you want to classify them, with many being further open to customisation by colour and style to give thousands of combinations. They are all made by Apple to a high technical & aesthetic standard, with the beauty further enhanced by great hardware. Adding the piece of information I want to any given watchface is typically restricted by the developer and can be tricky to configure.Īpple Watchfaces are things of beauty.Finding and installing a wholly new watchface is going to take some time.Changing a watch face takes at least 3 button presses.Often poor aesthetics on 3rd party watchfaces.Hardware screen quality typically has poor resolution and poor colour depth.Good flexibility for 3rd party developers to create & customise new watchfaces.Easy access to both pre-configured info like sports profile shortcuts and physiology data summaries/details.It’s the rest of the labyrinthine interface that lets Garmin down in my opinion. Widget glances were a relatively recent introduction by Garmin and, on the whole, I think they are great. If any of those widget glances strikes me as interesting I can drill through into more detail. Thus I can scroll through widget glances to see a compass, respiration, my last workout, my next planned workout, my FTP and much more. With the buttons on the left side of the watch, I can scroll through a list of active widget glanceswhich show me summary information about ‘me’, about ‘environmental factors’ and about ‘other things’. Sometimes I will be interested in ‘status’ pieces of info and Garmin lets me get to those relatively easily as well. So when I want to start a workout I know the Garmin is one button press away from letting me choose from my list of favourite sports profiles. I’ve just realised that I’m not especially bothered about the data that my chosen watch face shows. The reality for me is that I think most Garmin watchfaces are relatively ugly and this is one of only a handful that I think are pretty enough to wear. For example, at the top of my Crystal Watch face, I have chosen HR, battery and notifications but I could quite easily instead have chosen altitude, pressure and temperature. My favourite for some time has been CRYSTAL, shown above, and in this link, you can see that the developer lets you customise many elements of Crystal’s screen.

The Garmin watchface you choose can sometimes be a fully customised thing of wonder from a 3rd party.īroadly speaking, what you see in a 3rd party Garmin watch face has been crafted by one developer.

Making garmin watch faces