Predator — watch face for Wear OS

A hunter's wrist display for round Wear OS watches (built for the OnePlus Watch 3, 466×466): bright red dashes on pure black. The display wakes showing alien symbols, which assemble into the time piece by piece over two seconds, and then fall apart into symbols again: a five-second loop for as long as the screen is on.

The animation is rendered from the face's own layers.

The pictures are screenshots from the watch.

The display

Everything is drawn with one stroke: a short, thin, flat-ended dash, with more gap than ink.

• Time — seven-segment digits whose segments are those dashes, leaning slightly, so the hour stays readable.
• Running symbols — clusters of dashes, rays and small chevrons around the centre of each cell. The lattice of fourteen marks and the fourteen symbols built from it are invented for this face (PredatorRender.Mark, PredatorRender.Cluster). Each cell changes on its own, two to four times a second.

Features

• A 5 s loop while the screen is on, restarting on every wake: symbols assemble into the time over 2 s (one digit segment at a time, in random order), the time stands alone for 1.5 s, then it falls apart into symbols over 1.5 s
• Black background for OLED: the only lit pixels are the dashes, the date and a faint red back-light behind the display
• Battery as an icon and ten leaning dashes, one per started 10 %, drawn in the same stroke
• Always-on mode: hairline digits only

How it is built

Pure Watch Face Format v2 — the APK contains resources only, no code. Every bitmap is rendered procedurally.

• tools/PredatorRender.cs draws the digits, symbols, running frames and battery row; tools/render.ps1 compiles and runs it into res/drawable.
• tools/gen-xml.ps1 writes res/raw/watchface.xml.
• tools/mock.ps1 composites a test frame locally, without a watch.
• build.ps1 builds the APK without Gradle (aapt2 → zipalign → apksigner, debug key).

.\tools\render.ps1
.\tools\gen-xml.ps1
.\build.ps1 -Install

Requires PowerShell 7, the Android SDK (build-tools 37, platform android-34) and a JDK.

Install

Grab the APK from Releases and sideload it with adb install predator.apk, then long-press the current watch face and pick Predator. Needs Wear OS 4 or newer.

The design, the symbols and all artwork are original to this project. Font: a bold monospace under the SIL Open Font License.