Android Wear has been out and about on consumers’ wrists since last July at Google I/O. And since then, we’ve had updates from 4.4 to 5.0, to 5.0.1 and now 5.0.2, with another possible update, which we covered previously, on the horizon. And, since the point of Android is customization, developers readily took to the Wear platform to design not just apps but watch faces, and lots of them. One company that you might be surprised about not getting into the watch face game until today is the parent of Wear itself, Google. We say ‘until today’ because Google released a very special watch face onto the Play Store this morning, and it’s called Street Art.
This watch face is simple in what it does and allows you to do. You select to set it as your face on the watch, and can then, after a long-press as if to switch faces, access the few options there are on it. You can choose to have the time be displayed by the normal ticking hands pointing at the circling of numbers, have the time digitally at the bottom of the screen, or have a ring with a pair of dots, large for hour and small for minute, at the point where the numbers would be. Then there’s the option to show or hide the date being shown, which will just be the day rather than ‘March 11, 2015’ or however your locality formats the full date. What about the watch face itself, and what it looks like?
The watch showcases art from various artists from various parts of the world, and you don’t even have to say which ones you want to see. The face automatically switches art, which is the face of the watch under the time being told, every couple of minutes or so as well as every time you switch back to it from another face, and you have no control over it. Sadly, there’s currently no way to actually choose which pieces of art you like, set the duration of them being shown, or filter by artist, if they have more than one piece in the app’s gallery. But, if you want a watch face that is by the people who made Android and Wear, as well as a stylish collection of cool art from the streets of the world, then this is a face you’ll want to download (check the source link for a direct path). What’s also nice is that when you get a new piece of art as a face background, you’ll get a card that’ll give you the artist’s name, the title of the piece, as well as the gallery that the piece currently is in or part of so you don’t have to try to use Google Goggles to image search your wrist. What do you think of this minimal approach to a watch face? If Google were to release another watch face, what would you want to see as a feature or highlight of it? Let us know down below.