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by ThePimpOfSound 4189 days ago
I'm glad someone brought this up. (I'm the author of the FastCo piece.)

I wasn't sure if Samsung's claim of 1,000 apps included watchfaces, so I went through the Galaxy store and counted them by hand. The results (sections may be off by a few numbers as I was counting kind of quickly):

108 clocks 11 health 21 finance 211 lifestyle 17 social networking 129 entertainment 171 utilities TOTAL = 668 Note that the actual number is lower, since several apps were repeated across multiple sections and I didn't subtract them from the total.

So, Samsung does include watch faces, but the ratio of apps:faces is much greater. As for the actual number not being 1,000 apps, I'm guessing Samsung is counting apps for different languages that wouldn't appear in the US store. I wasn't sure whether to get into this level of hair-splitting in the piece, but ultimately figured I could get into it more if someone brought it up.

Anyway, I wouldn't really discount the importance of watch faces, especially on Pebble since they're key to customizing the look of your device. And I think they'll get more useful with time; Jawbone's app is technically a watch face, for instance, and some faces can display the weather, battery and calendars.

I agree that bragging about app count stops being instructive at some point, but in this case I think they show Pebble has done a fine job of establishing itself.

Thanks for reading!