[Wear OS General] wkevinw:
OK - this will be a relatively long post, but if you are interested in using more than the supplied watch faces when using your Android Wear watch with iOS, you will be (hopefully) rewarded at the end.

First, I have many Apple devices (phones, tablets, etc.), so I am comfortable in that environment. But for me buying an Apple Watch, especially a version 1 device, for over $350 didn't make sense to me, especially since I don't think I ever spent more than about $40 for a watch. Ever! Even for my Casio scientific watch back in the day. But I have always worn a watch and I use them for what they were originally intended - letting me know what time it is without having to pull out my phone. When the Apple watch did come out, I was intrigued, not about most of the functions, but because of the ability to design and change watch faces. But the Apple watch has very little flexibility here. So then I started to explore the other smart watch offerings, and found the Android Wear eco-system. And the customizations were and still are very open. With sites like WatchaWear and Facerepo, you can see that the sky is pretty much the limit. And with Facer and WatchMaker you can make extensive designs even if you can't develop Android Wear apps. But again, the early devices were almost as expensive as the Apple watch and also very large (I have moderate size wrists). That was the other thing I think Apple got right - two different sizes. But for round two of the Android Wear devices we see that the Moto 360 V2 and the ASUS Zenwatch 2 now come in two sizes. And both are quite reasonably priced, especially the ASUS offerings. I am not a fan of the flat tire on the MOTO's for aesthetic reasons. But for Black Friday the ASUS could be had for as little as $129, so I took the plunge. For a stainless steel Apple watch I would have paid over $550, plus I got a nice watch band for under $25 which would have cost me at least $50 on the Apple side, up to $149 for a nice metal band. So we are looking at $155 vs. up to $700 - quite a difference. Yes - I did spend an additional $40 as I had no other Android devices, but that was for the functionality of making beautiful watch faces. Since then I have learned about another option - AMIDuOS - an Android emulator. WatchMaker and Google Play work just fine in this emulator, and it is only $15 for the Lollipop (5.0.1) version.

I had done a reasonable amount of research and knew about some of the issues of working with the Android Wear offering while using iOS, so I purchased a cheap ($40) no contract phone (see tip above about AMIDuOS as another option) to set up the watch and run WatchMaker to design/modify watch faces. And with Android Wear now supporting connectivity over WiFi, I figured I could take the Android phone aroung to the places I visit most often just one (you need the phone to pair the watch to WiFi if it is protected and requires a passphrase), and then I could leave it home after that. And I really didn't care about most of the other functionality - I just wanted to be able to swap watch faces for different environments.

So I purchased WatchMaker premium from the Google Play store and away we went. I prepared may different watch faces and downloaded them to the watch and we were all set.

But there were a few functions that were nice to do from the watch when paired to the phone, and when I was in the car most of the time I would lose connectivity unless I bothered to set my iOS phone to tether, and even then I wouldn't get any notifications on the watch about my calendar events, messages or emails. And as it turns out some of those are quite nice to have on the watch.

So I looked around to see if there was any way to make WatchMkaer faces available by somehow allowing WatchMaker to run on the watch when paired to an iPhone. So after a couple of weeks and some hints and tips from the "Android Wear and iOS connectivity" thread, I have come up with a guide to allow you to run WatchMaker on the watch and select as many faces as you care to download. I will also explain how to get other watch faces that are available to run on the watch.

Kevin