The watch face space: a unique opportunity

As explored in our previous Medium post, watch faces have been an area of significant interest for Little Labs for over a year already. The reasons our team has been so laser focused on that space are simple:

• Watch faces represent over 50% of all downloads on smartwatch platforms that support a 3rd party ecosystem, e.g. Android Wear and Tizen
• The watch face screen represents the vast majority of all interactions with the smartwatch, whether via passive glances, or active interactions with complications.

The watch face marketplaces on Google Play and Samsung Tizen are already flush with thousands of options ranging from designs by amateur developers to premium branded content from professional design firms and traditional publishers. This gold rush is only going to be accelerated by hardware improvements like the new “always-on” feature of the Samsung Gear S3 allowing the watch face to be visible on your wrist at all times, making it the first true piece of “digital fashion” in the market.

The second key factor that will trigger an explosion of content in the marketplace will be Apple’s inevitable opening of the watch face ecosystem for Apple Watch. While it’s hard to predict when the Cupertino company will open the flood gates, we are already seeing signs that it may be sooner than we think with the introduction of a new “Face Gallery” section in the companion app. The structure and design of the latter already looks like the market place it will likely become in a future OS update:

The same way iMessage apps are creating an opportunity for brands and app publishers to invade a new area of your digital life by inserting themselves in your communications, watch faces are the first opportunity for these players to become part of your outward appearance, break the digital/physical barrier, and be seen by anybody in your close proximity in the real world.

With yearly shipments expected to reach over 50MM as early as 2020, hundreds of millions of people will be wearing smartwatches on their wrists, each becoming a walking billboard that brands and advertisers will soon have access to — the opportunity is massive.

More than just a pretty face

Beyond being a way for the smartwatch wearer to express their personality, watch faces also have the inherent and unique property of seeing huge engagement metrics. Unlike any other mobile apps, which are at most times buried in your pocket, and hidden behind a lock screen, watch faces are visible and “glanceable” at all times on your wrist. In fact, watch faces are seeing activations per user in the rage of 100–200 a day based on metrics collected on our Facer platform. Each of these activations are an opportunity to show the user new content and potentially monetize the interaction.

In aggregate, smartwatches will generate 2 Billion watch face views per day by the end of 2016 — this is the first truly frictionless content delivery channel in our mobile world.

Introducing Glimpse for Apple Watch

Having already achieved great success with our Facer platform in what we define as the “traditional” watch face space, i.e. faces focused mainly on delivering the time — our team took on a new challenge and spent the last few months working on pushing the boundaries of the medium and re-imagining it as a pure content delivery channel. The resulting product is Glimpse for Apple Watch.

The app, shown in action in the short clip below, is the first of its kind and allows users to consume content from their favorite publications and social feeds directly from their watch face — in other words, without launching anything. The content is visible to the user directly on their wrist, at all times.

With all your feeds piped directly onto your wrist, you are always connected to what happens in your world, and this without having to actively launch an app, or be constantly buzzed by notifications. This new paradigm is akin to turning on your TV and leaving it in the background as you’re going about your life at home, in other words: an ambient content consumption platform.

This is just the beginning…

Glimpse is available today in the App Store for you to set as your go-to watch face on your brand new Apple Watch Series 2… and it’s only the beginning. The starting line up of content includes channels like Nat Geo, Time, CNN, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest but a lot more will be released in the next few weeks.

We are excited to bring more and more content to people’s wrists in our upcoming updates. If you are a publisher interested in getting your content distributed on millions of Apple Watches, please contact us at partnerships@little-labs.com and we’ll work together to include you on our growing platform and onto smartwatch wearers’ wrists all over the world. We’re only getting started.