• swipe down for the quick toggles
• swipe up for the notifications (or system app drawer on Galaxy Watch 4)
• long press to pick a different face
• swipe horizontally for Tiles, the Google Assistant or Samsung notifications

A) A little background

In order to achieve the convenience of swiping sideways for the app drawer Bubble Cloud needs to add a layer on top of the regular watchface. I call it the “Active mode” when this layer is shown. You can tap icons to open apps, swipe sideways for the brightness control and the app drawer, long press bubbles for various extra options.

I call it “inactive” or “ambient” mode when this layer is hidden. In the inactive screen you can access all the regular watch face functionality: swipe down for the quick settings, swipe up to access notifications, sideways to switch watch faces.

We can toggle between active and inactive by tapping the clock bubble, and  recently I also added vertical swipe gestures too to switch between the two modes. So the first vertical swipe will toggle to inactive, then the regular Wear OS functionality kicks in. This is still not ideal, but maybe a little bit more intuitive to swipe twice instead of a tap-and-swipe.

Depending on the watch-face layout, you can even toggle the position of the hands and bubbles on the watch face. Tapping outside the ring of bubbles will bring the bubbles to the foreground (even over the peek card), Tapping again, or tapping in the center of the watch face will switch to inactive mode: (I call this the “reveal” mode)

[Theme shown is from pack #4]

Unfortunately there is no other way to implement all this increased functionality. Hopefully understanding how it works makes it easier to use.

B) Notifications

In Android Wear 1.5 the system notified watch faces when so called peek-cards appeared and Bubble Clouds was able to reduce the size of the overlay to show the peek cards.

Peek cards are gone in standard Android Wear 2.0 and the notification pop ups appear only for a brief few seconds. If the ambient watch–face is shown or while using other apps you will be able to see the pop ups, but the active bubble cloud overlay covers it.

C) Possible workarounds

There are several things that can be done:

NOTIFICATION ICONS plugin

This plugin for bubble clouds adds notification icons to your watch face (or app drawer / folder) to indicate active notifications on your phone. The number of these status icons can change dynamically as more and more notifications come in:

When tapped these notifications are displayed and can be interacted with:

You can install the notification icons plugin from the Bubble Cloud app on your phone:

I made several videos about this new way to manage notifications from Bubble Clouds:

• Demo and install guide
• Usage
• Setup on the watch

PEEK CARDS in Android Wear 2.9

Bubble Clouds has a card-type complication which now allows you to display long-text complications (such active notifications!) in the peek-card format that Android Wear 1.5 used to have. You can add

If using Bubble Clouds as your watch face you can add the peek card using the “Add complication” menu item:

 

Make sure to select “Recent notification” under the “General” group:

  

D) Other possible solutions

If for some reason you don’t like the peek cards, you can still do some things:

1. Switch the “Notification preview” style to “Always show”:

2. place an “unread count” complication on the watchface to be able to tell when new messages are available:

(Screenshot shows 1 unread message with the little bell icon)  [Theme from pack #7]

Open bubble cloud settings and tap “Add complication”

 

Select General → Unread notification count. Then press the star to move it to the watch–face (favorites)

 

It is also recommended to enable the wrist gestures in Wear OS, so you could check your notifications without touching your watch:

Version 9.37 brought full gesture support to the active watch face too, so if you use Bubble Cloud as your watch face, you will be able to show and hide even the peek card using wrist gestures.

  

Peek cards and wrist gestures make the default WearOS notification previews unnecessary: I recommend setting your notification previews to “none”.

 

Please note: Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 does not support wrist gestures at the system level, but I have re-implemented this functionality in the Bubble Cloud watch face: Wrist gestures (even on Galaxy Watch 4!)