[BinaryIdiot]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; I couldn't agree more. Not being able to build a watch face is incredible. Android Wear and Pebble both had this ability really quickly (Android Wear was at launch, I believe Pebble added it shortly thereafter) and much of this was done years ago.

But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.

[deong]

Android Wear didn't have it at launch either. It took six months or so to release an official watch face SDK. People did immediately hack watch faces together by making an app whose UI was a custom drawn watch face animation, but that was a little clunky in that you had to have an app on your phone for the face, and some of them were pretty rough on the watch battery.

But yes, overall I agree. It's a bit surprising just how locked down it is. Especially when it's hard to see the gain from it. The Apple Watch seems to have a shorter (or at least not longer) battery life than most of the Android Wear models that allow taxing the watch battery to do quite a lot more stuff.