A rebuild of the Pixel Watch Utility watch face in Watch Face Format,
for Wear OS 5 and newer. Date row, clock, three round complication slots, and a
LONG_TEXT row that defaults to the next calendar event. Colour (35 colourways
from the original), Bold Time and all four slots are editable on the watch.
The bottom row is the LONG_TEXT slot, here showing the next calendar event.
If you moved to a Pixel Watch 4 and found Utility missing, this is why: Google
dropped the face in version 4.x of its Pixel Watch faces package, along with every
LONG_TEXT complication slot in that package, so none of the faces it ships can
show a next calendar event. Utility Bold is the closest one left and it has no
event row. Third-party faces still can — Digital
Informer does, in the same Watch Face Format — just not in Utility's layout,
which is the point of this rebuild. Sideloading the 3.x APK does not work either:
WearServices checks a legacy watch face's signing key against an allowlist, and a
resigned copy can never pass. That check only applies to faces identified by a
service class name, and Watch Face Format faces have none, hence this rebuild.
The layout is generated by gen_wff.py from measurements taken off the original
rather than guessed. NOTES.md collects what the format turned out to
require along the way, and the scripts used to verify the result.
Releases carry a build that uses the device font, so it contains none of Google's assets:
adb install -r UtilityWFF-4.0-device-font.apkThen long-press the watch face, pick Utility, and tap the pencil to configure. Signed with a debug key, so sideloading only.
Needs the Android SDK build-tools and a debug keystore. No Gradle.
python3 gen_wff.py # generates wff/res/raw/watchface.xml, which is not committed
./build_wff.sh # aapt2 -> zipalign -> apksigner
adb install -r build-wff/UtilityWFF.apkbuild_wff.sh picks the newest build-tools and platform in your SDK; override
with SDK, BUILD_TOOLS, PLATFORM, KS. Pass --no-google-assets to
gen_wff.py to reproduce the released variant exactly.
The original's clock fonts and preview art are Google's proprietary assets and
are not in this repository; without them the build falls back to the device font,
which on a Pixel Watch is Google Sans anyway. To use the originals, extract them
from your own copy of a 3.x com.google.android.wearable.watchface.rwf APK —
4.x no longer carries the face:
python3 scripts/extract_assets.py path/to/rwf-3.x.apk
python3 gen_wff.py && ./build_wff.shThat reproduces the same APK byte for byte as the build this face was verified from, on a Pixel Watch 4 and the Wear OS 7 emulator.
MIT (LICENSE). Layout, colourway names and proportions are derived from Google's Utility watch face; not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.