1. Together with any watch face in “App drawer mode”  (follow link for more information)
2. Set as the watch face

Watch face mode is where Bubble Cloud can show its full power:

Here is the up-to-date feature list (⌚ marked items only available in watch face mode):

• Clock styles: full screen clock or clock is one of the bubbles
• Clock types: analog, digital, or the new text clock option via plugin
• Digital styles: one or multiple row layout, optional ⌚ seconds and AM/PM display
• ⌚ One touch switching between clock bubble types (analog/single line digital/multi-line digital/textual) watch face
• 100 themes in 11 theme packs (some paid): recolor components and mix&match fonts, hands, dials, backgrounds from multiple themes
• Brightness control (toggle auto/manual, ⌚ long press to adjust ambient dimming level)
• Automatic day and night brightness switched at sunset and sunrise
• ⌚ Automatic ambient dimming at the same time next night
• Mini launcher (paginated app drawer + folders, hide apps) many different smart auto layouts for app drawer and favorite cloud
• Optional icon labels in the app drawer and folders
• Full icon pack support for all bubbles (all standard Android icon packs work!)
• Long press bubbles to edit colors, weight, other properties (direct link to app info and Play Store page)
• Special ambient mode with sweeping seconds hand (on all watches!) timer mode: vibration at every 15, 30 or 60 seconds
• Toggle phone and watch wifi, bluetooth and sound/ringmodes
• Sunset/sunrise LiveInfo*
• Date LiveInfo* (colors, layout configurable)
• Daily step count (adjustable daily goal with color indicator) + optional stand-up alert via plugin
• ⌚ Place favorite bubbles on watch face
• Double tap watch face for voice search (configurable)
• ⌚ Full complication support: unlimited number of complications (can be placed in app drawer and folders too)
• ⌚ Two layout options for complications
• ⌚ Five indicator options for range-type complications (colors and or rings)
• ⌚ Background image provider support with image retention and optional dimming
• Watch battery level (color indicator)
• Phone battery level (color indicator) + Find my phone function (raise phone to stop ringing)
• ⌚ Touch lock (long press for auto-lock)
• Dimmed theater mode with adjustable dimming (25% to 100% dimmed)
• Weather LiveInfo* (current local weather + other location or next day)
• Cloud of favorite contacts (call, text or email via multiple numbers)
• Multiple World time LiveInfo*
• ⌚ Unread/read notification count LiveInfo* (with color indicator)
• Launch Tasker tasks, toggle Smart Lights,  or even open phone apps using bubbles
• Change bubble content, weight and location via Tasker plugin
• ⌚ Hideable peek card displays long text complications (such as recent notification) – with wrist gesture detection
• Full rotating crown support for scrolling app drawer / adjusting peek card
• Dynamically added notification icons (phone status bar icons) with count bubbles via Notification icon plugin
• Remap long press (and double long press) of the main button and single + double press of secondary buttons (including accidental push alert and do-nothing options)
• ⌚ Override swipe behavior: app drawer on one side, configurable Quick Swipe Panel on the other side (Voice search, contact cloud, any folder or app)
• Sticky open: double tap app bubbles to automatically reopen them on tilt to wake (mark apps for auto-sticky: always opened in sticky mode)
• Watch volume control (select media / notification / alarm volume, long press icon to mute/unmute)
• ⌚ Selective ambient mode: mark watch face bubbles to keep showing in ambient mode
• ⌚ Watch face background color based on the minute of the hour (two color scale options)
• ⌚ Optional outline font in ambient mode
• Charger sound (beep when successfully connected and if accidentally removed before fully charged)
• Rotate screen when charger connected
• ⌚ Always rotate the watch face
• Ring phone when watch is fully charged
• ⌚ Full control over status indicators (charging, flight mode, DND etc) and notification dot
• Full backup / restore to cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive)
• Standalone app restore assistant after watch reset
• Drag and drop custom layout editor
• ⌚ Tap watch face edge to bring complications over the watch hands (if they are covered)
• ⌚ Optional ticking sound
• Use your own jpg/png files for hands, dials, themed bubbles, backgrounds (with square/circular crop tool built in)

[updated: March 21, 2019]

* LiveInfo: bubble shows information instead of the app icon. Tapping the bubble still opens the app (i.e. weather app’s bubble can show weather, calendar app’s bubble shows the date etc)

Active vs. inactive vs. ambient screen

The Bubble Cloud Watch Face works in three modes:

• Interactive mode – when swipes and long presses are captured by Bubble Clouds
• Inactive mode – when only taps are captured by Bubble Clouds
• Ambient mode – “Always on” mode, when no input is handled by Bubble Clouds

We need the inactive mode, because that’s where the standard Wear OS touch features can be accessed:

• swipe down for the quick toggles
• swipe up for the notifications
• long press to pick a different face
• swipe horizontally for Google Assistant and Google Fit (these can be disabled in Expert settings, see below)

Opposite of these, the active mode lets you access the Bubble Cloud features:

• open apps and other bubbles
• swipe horizontally for the app drawer (and Quick Swipe Panel if enabled)
• swipe vertically to show/hide peek card
• long press bubbles to edit them

We can switch between interactive and inactive by tapping on the clock bubble. The watch enters ambient mode just like any other Wear OS watch face after a timeout.

By default the watch face enters interactive mode when you wake the watch. If you want to access the standard Wear OS swipe (and long press) action, you will need to tap on the clock bubble to exit interactive mode.

You can change this behaviour in two ways:

1. Make the inactive mode the dominant by disabling the expert option “Priority for Active cloud”
    
   The watch will stay in inactive mode (swipes and long presses are handled by the OS) until you tap on the clock bubble

2. Override the horizontal swipes even in inactive mode using one or both of two other expert options:

    
   If you enable these options swiping horizontally on the inactive watch face will enter interactive mode, hence overriding the default WearOS functions (Assistant and/or Fit)

Horizontal swipes in interactive mode:

• By default swiping left to right on the watch face in interactive mode takes you to the app drawer (archive cloud) and optionally the brightness control
• You can add a swipe area on the right to left swipe to access voice search (Google Assistant) and optionally the volume control. This is called Quick Swipe Panel in my app → video

You can switch left and right (move the app drawer to the right) and also you can assign any other action to the Quick Swipe Panel, as explained in the mentioned video.

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 watch face. 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)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1n3IGhCOG8&index=13&list=PL0wrCqIpYbB4anPdhRAtyx4ixxi6hUxMN
[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.

There are advantages to having this two-layer architecture in Bubble Clouds: 

• we get to override the horizontal swipe to change watch face
• we get notification peek cards (see below)
• we get unlimited number of watch face complications which can even be put in the archive cloud and folders
• the Bubble Cloud watch face is extremely battery friendly, our watches will last longer than with other watch faces
  (except that your watch becomes more useful, and since you will be using it for more…)
• you can apply many different watch face styles I call “1-click themes”, and even mix different components of these themes

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

Exciting news: I have just finished working on  this plugin for bubble clouds witch can add 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”.