What's the point of a smart watch if you can't change the dial and face however you want? It's like when carriers wouldn't let you load your own ring tones on to your phone, because they didn't want to cannibalize their own ring tone sales.

>What's the point [..] if you can't change

It seems to be part of Apple's strategy, to focus on Out Of The Box experience, not on user configuration. And to the greater point? To make profit. The perfect product is not the point, nor is the perfectly satisfied customer.

There's so much more to a smart watch than a fully-customizable watch face.

While I fully believe that Apple should open up to third-party faces, I am quite content with the customization options that they offer now.

Is there so much more? Unless using it for sports, it's basically an extension of your phone to serve notifications and that's it.

Any color, so long as it's black. Henry Ford, Steve Jobs.

There may be more, but it includes that functionality at the very least. That would be the absolute base line functionality of a watch that has a bit-mapped display.

I think they should give us the option to create watch faces, but don't care about it much. It's very far down my priority list of what I want from Apple Watch.

As for the reasons why they don't, my speculation is the following (I'm not defending them): They are worried about custom watch faces that might perform poorly or draw too much battery. Watch is a challenging platform to develop for as watchOS is very protective of its resources and won't hesitate to kill your app. But Apple probably doesn't want to kill the watch face and at the same time doesn't trust the developers to develop their watch faces to Apple's standard.

Yup, one of my favorite parts of having my last smart watch was making it look like a Fallout pip-boy. It would be required for me.

I'd argue that the success of the Apple Watch proves that you're incorrect.

I see more of them worn than regular wrist watches. Considering they sold more watches than the Swiss watch industry (2019), it's not surprising.

It's the most popular watch in the world.

even stranger since apple doesn't sell faces (with the exception of the Hermes faces which come with purchase of their obscenely expensive watch bands). seems like something they'd just shoot down in review if something got too close to an Hermes face.

> What's the point of

The point of a smart phone is not ringtones. The point of a smart phone is not even being a phone anymore. It's everything else you do with it.

The point of a smart watch is not cool watch faces.

You want skins/customization, which is fair. But you have to admit it's not core functionality.

My guess is that this is likely because of the availability of an always on display. Apple has likely programmed each of the watch faces into the microcontroller that manages that low power mode. The other option would be to wake up the main cpu every time you need to refresh the 3rd party watch face, but that would have a power cost.