Evidence has been found in an APK teardown of the Google Photos 6.8 app for Android that hints at a Wear OS Google Photos watch face. This teardown was done by the folks over at 9to5Google who found numerous strings in the code describing a “photos_watchface_preview” that will let you “Select watch face photos,” similar to the capabilities that the Samsung Galaxy wearable app currently offers.
The difference in this case is that the Samsung wearable app only allows you to select one picture from your Google Photos, while the new code will allow you to select multiple photos, suggesting that the watch will cycle through these images throughout the day. This addition is presumably planned for the launch of the Pixel Watch and will hopefully be announced during the Made by Google event on October 6th.
However, since the code doesn’t call out the Pixel Watch specifically, it is possible that this feature will also make it to the Samsung wearables as well as any other watch running Wear OS 3. As this is early days, and all we have to go by is code, we have no idea how the setup or the UI will look. Additionally, since this info is coming from an APK teardown, there is really no guarantee that this feature will ship, but we can hope.
Meanwhile, Google continues their marketing campaign to bring awareness to the launch of the Pixel Watch. Yesterday, a video was published on the official “Made by Google” Youtube account featuring the “Google Pixel Collection” in which we got to see more details on an analog watch face with “Material You” elements. Today, the same account published another video, only this time it was all about the Pixel Watch.
As the video showed off the beautiful design of the watch, it also cycled through some more of its watch faces. Some of the faces were analog and minimalistic, while others were digital and chronograph-like. You can see some screenshots above of the watch faces featured in the video.
All of these Pixel Watch goodies and reveals lately have me so pumped for the release of the watch. Thankfully we won’t have to wait very long, since according to the recent leaks, the watch may gracing our wrists as early as November 4th. The timing makes this a perfect holiday gift, which is probably what Google is going for here.
