When Apple released the first developer preview of watchOS 4.3.1 last week, the biggest news was that support for first-gen apps will be going away in the fifth version of Apple’s wrist-sized operating system. That’s not likely to affect many apps or users, but it does signal that Apple is developing its wearable platform at a blistering pace, with another round of new APIs and frameworks surely on deck for watchOS 5.
It was reported over the weekend that one of those new APIs might be third-party watch faces, a feature that Apple Watch users have wanted since day one. Hidden in the code for watchOS 4.3.1, 9to5Mac found a reference to a placeholder for “3rd part face config bundle generation” in Apple’s existing NanoTimeKit, which the site interpreted as a sign that Apple would finally loosen its grip on watch faces. That might not be the case, however. As longtime Apple developer Steve Troughton-Smith points out on Twitter, Apple could simply be referring to third-party complications with this log message, as the watchOS SDK already allows bundling for use across a variety of watch faces.
