Cinder Hybrid Watch Face

BasilBase

About this app

Cinder is a rugged sports dial. Two polished hands over a digital hour, on black, inside a machined bezel.

HANDS AND DIGITS AT ONCE

Cinder runs both clocks together. Steel hour and minute hands sweep from an accent hub, and underneath them the same time is set in heavy condensed figures - the hour in bone white, the minutes in the accent colour, split by two square dots. Look at the hands for the shape of the day; read the figures when you want the number. Below them run the weekday and the date, ruled off on each side.

The bezel is the other half of the design: seventy-two bevelled tiles around the rim, eight brushed metal markers with an accent inlay on each, four arrowed cardinal tips and four ribbed panels between them. It is structure, not a gauge. It does not fill up and it never pretends to.

FOUR COMPLICATIONS

Four round cells, at twelve, nine, three and six. Press and hold the dial, open Customize, and point each one wherever you want it.

All four accept the same things:
- a short text reading
- a ranged value, drawn as a number with a six segment gauge wrapped around the cell
- an app's monochrome icon, or its own small image
- or nothing at all, and then the cell draws nothing: no zero, no dash, no empty ring

The gauge is only ever drawn for a complication that really reports a range. Nothing here invents a percentage to make a ring look busy, and nothing borrows a number from the cell next door.

Three of the four arrive filled, on Wear OS's own data sources: heart rate at twelve, your step count at nine, the watch battery at three. The cell at six is left free on purpose - it is yours from the first minute, and until you fill it, it stays blank rather than showing you a placeholder.

TWO APP SHORTCUT SLOTS

Either side of the hands, above the digits, sit two more slots, and these take a picture rather than a reading. Put an app in each and the watch face becomes the way in: one tap, with no launcher to scroll. Leave one empty and it draws nothing at all.

SIX COLOURWAYS

Orange, cyan, blue, green, red and purple. The choice is not a highlight swapped out - it runs through the whole face: the bezel tiles, the inlay in each metal marker, the fill down the hands, the minutes, the colon, the date and every gauge. The black stays black, so the dial keeps its contrast whichever one you pick.

TWELVE OR TWENTY-FOUR

The hour format is chosen on the watch. Follow the watch's own setting, or pin it to 24 hour, or to 12 hour - and in 12 hour, AM or PM is spelled out above the figures rather than left for you to work out.

ALWAYS-ON

The ambient screen drops the face instead of dimming it. No dial, no bezel, no hands, no complications: what stays is the hour, the minutes and AM or PM where it applies. It has its own brightness too, in four steps from a low glow to the full weight of the awake digits. Measured at 2 percent of the display lit.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

There is no companion phone app, no account, no ads and no subscription, and nothing is locked behind a purchase inside the app. The face asks for no permissions of its own and reads no weather of its own, so nothing on it can sit blank waiting for a signal: what a cell shows is the complication you pointed at it.

GETTING IT ONTO THE WATCH

Buy it on the phone, then open the Play Store on the watch, where it will be waiting in your library. Press and hold the current face, swipe to Cinder, and tap Customize to choose the colour, the hour format, your four complications and your two shortcuts.

If you have a question, or something is not working right, please write to us at [e-mail].

What’s new

First release.

Four complications at twelve, nine, three and six, each one yours to reassign, plus two app shortcut slots beside the hands. A gauge is drawn only for a complication that really reports a range, and an empty cell draws nothing at all.

Six colourways, a 12 or 24 hour setting chosen on the watch with AM and PM spelled out, and an always-on screen with four brightness levels.