Six Seven: Love it or hate it, building this watch face taught me a lot about Wear OS development.

I know the whole “Six Seven” thing has a love/hate relationship, or maybe it’s just a hate/hate relationship? As an independent developer, I looked at this trend as a fascinating technical challenge: Could I force a Wear OS watch face to completely ignore standard timekeeping and count to :67?

I thought I’d share a bit about the engineering hurdles behind bringing this to life, because it ended up being an incredible learning exercise for me while using Watch Face Studio and custom logic expressions.

• Hijacking the Clock: Getting standard Wear OS time to count smoothly from :58, :59, :60, all the way to :67 before snapping back to reality at :08 required a lot of non-linear mathematical formulas under the hood.
• Dynamic Tag Expressions: To make the digits “dance” whenever the number 67 appears in a user’s real-time step count, heart rate, or battery level, I had to write complex conditional statements that scan the numbers for any value that contains “67” in a row anywhere within a number.
• Countdown Timer: Building the tracker at the top, which acts like a mini New Year’s Eve countdown to the exact second of the next hourly shift, taught me a ton about formatting precise mathematical time strings.
• Easter Eggs: Who doesn’t love a good Easter Egg. Although not apparent, most of the color themes and transparencies used contain “67” within their hex codes and transparency levels.
• Pricing: Although free for launch, the app is priced at .67, or contains “67” within the price. As you can tell, I went all in to the 67th degree.
• App Version Number: Even the version number of the app pays homage to its origins.

It was a fantastic coding exercise that pushed me to redefine what normal timekeeping looks like on a watch. Figuring out these hurdles gave me a great idea for another watch face (not 6-7 related) that I think will appeal to the mainstream, and something I’ve never seen before. I will be starting development soon.

Not a fan of the 6-7 trend? Check out my other watch faces, guaranteed not to make any 6-7 references.

• Peek Hour
• Radical Time