Stephen Schenck / Android Authority

TL;DR

• Smartwatch face platform Facer made a few announcements at CES today.
• Facer will soon be available on some RTOS-based wearables.
• A new Face Chime feature allows watch face makers to add custom hourly chimes to their faces.

Smartwatch face platform Facer announced a handful of notable updates at CES today. The popular custom watch face creator and marketplace is expanding to more smartwatch platforms, and Facer faces are getting new capabilities, including a handy hourly chime option.

Facer is expanding to RTOS watches soon. Facer will be pre-installed on Reebok’s upcoming Kinetic smartwatch (seen in images here), which will run on VitalOS with MicroEJ VEE Wear. The company’s also partnering with free and open-source graphics library LVGL, an integration that’ll see Facer watch faces available on RTOS-based watches from a number of brands, including Xiaomi.

Facer also announced that it’ll soon support AOSP-based smartwatches — a category of wearable that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t yet exist. Facer says it’ll announce its first AOSP smartwatch partnership sometime this year.

Facer watch faces are getting a little better in general thanks to a couple of new integrations. The platform’s partnered with Citizen to enable new functionality with the Riiiver platform. Riiiver will let Facer watch faces do things like connect to the internet to pull information like sports scores and control actions on connected devices.

Finally, Facer introduced a feature it’s calling Face Chime, which allows watch face creators to add a custom hourly chime sound to their faces — a feature I’d like to see Wear OS adopt in the future (Samsung’s One UI Watch skin supports a similar feature, but Wear OS itself doesn’t). Facer says that Face Chime will launch on Wear OS 6 this month with updated support on “hundreds of watch faces.”

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