Newsletter 
In an official announcement made via Medium, Little Labs has announced that its smartwatch app, Facer, has finally reached over a million users. Perhaps more interestingly, many of those users are turning into watch face designers – and making a substantial income by putting their self-designed watch faces on Facer. The users themselves are spread out across several platforms, including the Apple Watch, Android Wear, and Samsung’s Tizen. The announcement was made March 21, 2017.
Facer is already a popular application for getting and setting watch faces across all major smartwatch platforms. In fact, its popularity is such that Google even partnered with Little Labs to show off Wear 2.0 at MWC at the end of last month. That popularity is partially down to the fact that users can create and share or sell their own designs. According to the announcement, some of those designers have become popular enough that they are developing entirely new brands under which the designs can be sold. Several of those brands, Little Labs says, are popular enough to rival more traditional watch brands – with some brands being worn by more than 500k users a year. While the company provides three testimonials supporting that fact, one in particular that stands out is from designer “GRR.” Little Labs cites GRR as having said that “Thanks to Facer, I can pay for my University studies!” As anybody who has been to a college of any sort can readily attest, that statement probably signifies a much bigger income than one might expect could be earned designing digital watch faces.
While the vast majority of people who create watch faces for the platforms supported probably shouldn’t expect to earn any kind of income from their work, Little Labs is quick to point out that there is still room for more designers. An application is required to put paid designs on the Facer store, presumably to prevent plagiarism and other similar problems. However, there are also tools and guides which have been created to make developing unique and functional watch faces much easier. It should be mentioned that the results of becoming hugely profitable are almost certainly not typical. However, manufacturers continue to provide new entries into the Android Wear product line-up and there is definitely money to be made in watch face design for those with the talent to do it. If designing or development is something that interests you, now looks to be a great time to look into Facer.