Most smartwatch email notifications are mirrored phone notifications. That works fine as long as the phone is connected, the correct app is installed, the operating system allows forwarding, Bluetooth is stable and all notification permissions are still active. As soon as one of these parts is missing, the watch may look connected but important email alerts do not arrive. This is especially visible in mixed setups where a Wear OS watch is used without the usual Android companion workflow, for example when the primary phone is an iPhone or when the phone is intentionally left behind.

Mail Provider takes a different approach. Instead of waiting for another device to forward a notification, the tyckr Core connects to the mail server and checks the inbox directly. It supports the common mail protocols IMAP and POP3, including secure TLS connections. New mail can then be turned into a tyckr notification and displayed with the sender, subject and a cleaned preview of the message text.

The new provider is designed for the quick glance use case. You do not need the full mail client experience on a tiny display. You need to know who wrote, what the subject is, and enough text to decide whether it is important. Mail Provider focuses exactly on that. It extracts the readable text from the mail body, prefers plain text when available, converts HTML mail into clean text when needed, removes empty lines and skips noisy HTML content such as style blocks, tracking links and boilerplate markup.

This is important because modern transactional emails are often HTML-only and include a lot of CSS, tracking pixels, hidden layout tables and long URLs. A normal raw mail preview can easily start with @import, media queries or encoded HTML entities instead of the real message. Mail Provider is built to produce notification text that is useful on a watch, not just technically extracted from a MIME message.

The outstanding advantage is independence from phone notification mirroring. If your Wear OS watch or tyckr Wear OS app has network access, Mail Provider can still check the mailbox even when the companion phone is not part of the notification path. This can be valuable in several everyday situations:

Compared to many smartwatch products, Mail Provider is not limited to mirroring what the phone already received. It behaves like a real tyckr data provider. That means the mail state can be integrated into the same Core that already handles weather, MQTT, REST APIs, calendars, timers, sensors and other dynamic information. Email becomes part of the flexible tyckr system instead of being locked inside one phone app.

This makes the feature especially powerful for people who use tyckr professionally or for personal automation. A mailbox can be used as a notification channel for invoices, alerts, server messages, booking confirmations, family mail or anything else that already arrives by email. The watch can show the latest sender and subject, while tyckr keeps the notification stack under control and limits the number of visible messages. When a new mail arrives and the maximum number of mail notifications is already displayed, the oldest one is dismissed first so the newest mail can appear on top in the Android notification stack.

Mail Provider also respects the reality of email. IMAP has unread state and message IDs, POP3 has UIDL identifiers and no read state, and mail bodies can be plain text, HTML or multipart messages with attachments. The provider handles these differences internally so the result is simple for the user: configure the mailbox, enable notifications and let tyckr do the work.

Mail Provider will arrive with Core 4.4.0 and is another step toward making tyckr independent, flexible and useful on every supported device. It is not only a new mail checker. It is a new way to think about smartwatch notifications: direct, provider-based, configurable and not tied to a companion phone being available at the right moment.

For users who depend on email but do not always have a connected Android phone nearby, this is a major improvement. Your watch can become a more reliable information endpoint, and tyckr can turn email into a clean, readable and glanceable notification source.

Happy tyckring!

In the last Core 4.1.0 feature update we added air quality indexes (AQI) and ozone values to the Weather Provider.
Now we have added support for pollen data, allowing users suffering from allergies to monitor pollen levels directly on their watchface and widget. This feature is especially useful to plan and monitor outdoor activities accordingly.
Supported pollen types are Hazel, Alder, Birch, Oak, Grass, Mugwort and Ragweed.
Pollen data is provided as current value and as time series formatted data, which can be easily integrated into various Facelets like the Heatmap for visualization.

We completely refactored and improved the SNTP and GPS time synchronization logic of the Time Provider.
Tablets and low cost watches often have less accurate system clocks that tend to drift over time, especially during sleep or doze mode.
Our new drift correction unit automatically measures and adjusts the time based on periodic synchronizations with the system time. This ensures that the displayed time remains accurate over extended periods without GPS or network coverage.

The pressure sensor data of the Environment Provider can now be utilized to calculate and display altitude information. This feature is particularly beneficial, if no GPS reception is available.
tyckr uses the pressure to altitude formula published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for conversion.

We have expanded the GPS data support to include additional information such as the count of receiving GPS, Glonass and Galileo satellites.
Furthermore, we now provide the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) values for the received satellites as time series formatted data to be visualized in Facelets like the TimeSeries or Heatmap.
This data can be used to analyze the quality of the GPS signal reception.

The latest version 1.2.0 of the Wear OS app is now available in the Google Play Store.
The latest version 3.2.0 of the widget is now available in the Google Play Store or via direct APK download.
The latest version 4.2.0 of the watchface is now available in the Google Play Store or via direct APK download.

To use the new features, please make sure to update the tyckr editor to version 2.3.0 or higher.

We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements in this release.
As always, we appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future improvements.
Happy tyckring!

Visit the pricing page to see the discount and choose the plan that fits your needs.
Upgrade from your workspace or start a new trial — the offer applies automatically.

The Halloween pricing ends on October 31 at 23:59 UTC, so lock in your subscription before the savings disappear.

Happy tyckring!

Ty-Touch uses the Launcher Facelet in Pie 6 Mode, which creates 6 segments. The outer and inner launcher diameter is selectable, but the inner diameter should not get to small, cause a long press on the inner circle is reserved by the OS to open the face chooser and config.

In the Launcher settings you can select the tap time, acknowledge behavior etc.
Have a look at the segment actions and how they trigger a Value Provider to display the altitude and the compass temporary. Its pretty simple.
The outer text consists of a Round Text Facelet using the 'Text Angle Format'.
For a basic clock display, I like using the Clock Facelet, cause it has some handy features out of the box, like activating hand transparency on a center tap, an alarm hand showing up when an alarm is active and an integrated ticks gauge, which I used for the battery level in light green here.

Just copy this face and customize your personal data like weather or body info in the upper free space.

This is a really short "how to" tutorial, because all functionality is supported right out of the box.
Tyckr’s Image / Video Facelet allows you to render video stream stills at given interval times as an image snapshot. This is perfect for monitoring security cameras, baby monitors, or any IP camera with accessible video streams.

Many modern IP cameras have motion detection or body recognition and can initiate a HTTP API request in case of a motion event.
Setting up the tyckr Push Notification API as HTTP request sends a push notification directly to the watch, to inform the user instantly and reliable.

Happy monitoring!

The Navigation Provider calculates various navigation data between two GPS coordinates, including the distance and bearing between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes by using the haversine formula.
As the GPS coordinates are referring to true north, the bearing needs to be converted to magnetic north to get the accurate direction. This is done by the Orientation Provider using the WMM2025 model, which provides the magnetic declination for a given location and time.
However, the precision depends completely on the quality of the integrated compass.

While developing the idea of the Qibla Finder, the idea of calculating prayer times came up. Muslim prayer times are based on the position of the sun, the earth and the actual position on it.
We wanted to create a really high precision prayer time calculation, so we are using the astronomical algorithms of Jean Meeus.

Video is coming up soon. Stay tuned!

Despite of a lot of complains in the developer community, the introduction of a code free watchface format is a big and necessary step in the right direction.
Why that?
Because all the heavy rendering calculations can be offloaded to a powerful and energy efficient GPU.
Apple is doing the same on their watches since the beginning.
When it comes to rendering a watchface by code, there is a lot of bad, there are a lot of inefficient, sluggish, slow and battery draining watch faces out there, so having a kind of declarative format is a really good thing.

A lot of watch faces out there need code to work properly. Think about a watchface which processes weather or health data and displays it in a fancy way.
The new WFF is codeless, all coded functions should be organized as complication data providers which need to be installed separately.

Watches, like the new Google Pixel 3 or Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Ultra, which have Wear OS 5 preinstalled are not able to use the old watchface format anymore. Yeah, hard to believe. All old non WFF watch faces are not listed in the PlayStore on theses watches either. Even worse, on latest watches like Googles Pixel 3, the whole runtime environment for old faces is missing - and other watches will do the same later on.

On the time of writing, its still possible to install old watch faces via an an app called Wear Installer 2 on OS 5 watches.

Personally, I think this step is and was way too radical, cutting off an colorful, creative, highly customizable ecosystem. Why don’t mark WFF watch faces in the store with a green star and let them coexist with the older format? Let the user decide.
At least give the opportunity to install a watch face service from the store if the user want and need it.

One of the most compelling features of the 24-hour clock is its clarity. Unlike the 12-hour format, which requires a distinction between AM and PM, the 24-hour clock leaves no room for ambiguity. When you see “14:00,” you know it’s 2 PM without any further thought. This precision is not only crucial for military operations but also invaluable in fields like aviation, computing and international communications.

The 24-hour format has become a universal language of time. It transcends borders and languages, providing a consistent method of timekeeping that can be understood by people from all over the world. This global standardization is particularly beneficial in our interconnected age, where coordination across time zones is an everyday necessity. Our planet operates on a roughly 24-hour cycle, and the 24-hour clock mirrors this natural rhythm. It divides the day into a continuous stream of hours, from midnight to midnight, seamlessly aligning with the Earth’s rotation.
This inherent harmony between human timekeeping and the natural world is both practical and poetic. Another advantage is slow speed of the hour hand which runs at half the speed of a 12-hour clock which may reduce the personal stress level.

There’s an undeniable aesthetic appeal in the straightforwardness of the 24-hour clock. It embodies a minimalist philosophy: no frills, just the essentials. This simplicity is not only functional but also visually pleasing, a clean and elegant representation of time.

Using the Clock Facelet makes is very simple to build a 24-hour watch, just select one of the 24-Hour-Top or 24-Hour-Bottom Hour modes and adjust the dial accordingly.
24-Hour-Top places the zero hour on top (12 o’clock position) as seen on the GMT clock above, while 24-Hour-Bottom sets the zero hour to the bottom (6 o’clock position). It’s a matter of personal style and the application field which mode to choose.
For me, it’s more intuitive to have the zero hour at the bottom, similar to the famous BOTTA UNO 24 watch, which takes it even further by omitting the minute hand.
Another advantage of this style is its correlation to the sun’s position, placing noon at the 12 o’clock position.

That being said, we use the Solar Times Provider to obtain actual location based sunrise and sunset times and a Pie Facelet which uses the converted times as start and stop angle. When the hour hand in inside the pie area, it indicates daytime. This creates a nice visual representation of the day/night ratio.

This is what the 24-hour face looks like:

The clock’s center dot displays the actual state of the Time Provider. Additionally, the actual day/night times and the WiFi connection status are displayed.

The share code is: iSkaU6bm

Copy this face, customize colors and enhance it with additional solar or lunar data you like to see!

To install tyckr as a watch face use the Play Store on your watch and search for "tyckr".

After the installation, you can start the tyckr watchface by selecting it in the watchface settings, you see the following screen:

Open the tyckr Editor App on your phone/browser at edit.tyckr.io and login by a service provider (Google, Microsoft, Github) or create a Mail account. It’s a PWA so you can install the Editor right on the Home Screen.
After a successful login, goto "My Devices" and press the green "+" button in the right bottom corner.
You can enter the tyckr ID shown on the watch or simply scan the QR code.

Your watch is now registered and you can start to Create your first Face in the section below.

To install tyckr as a Wear OS App on Wear OS 5 (and above) devices, use the Play Store on your watch and search for "tyckr".

Open the tyckr Editor App on your phone/browser at edit.tyckr.io and login by a service provider (Google, Microsoft, Github) or create a Mail account. It’s a PWA so you can install the Editor right on the Home Screen.
After a successful login, goto "My Devices" and press the green "+" button in the right bottom corner.
You can enter the tyckr ID shown on the watch or simply scan the QR code.

Your watch is now registered and you can start to Create your first Face in the section below.

To install tyckr as a widget use the Play Store on your phone or tablet and search for "tyckr".
Alternatively, if the Play Store is not available, you can download the APK on the Download Page and install it directly on your device.

Start the initial setup by opening the tyckr App for the first time by tapping the app icon or selecting Open after installation.

To enable the tyckr widget service, you need to grant a few mandatory permissions, particularly location access.
As tyckr runs as a background service, it requires these permissions to function correctly, even if location services are not actively used.
Once all permissions are set, add the initial widget to your Home Screen:

Tap the "Gear" button to open the Settings screen, alternatively you can tap the app icon to do the same:

The code displayed beneath About tyckr is the TID (tyckr ID). It’s a unique identifier which references your device and is required for sending Push Messages to it.
Tapping the blue info button provides help with the options.

Tab Open Face Editor App to start creating and editing your first face.
The Face Editor App edit.tyckr.io is a Progressive Web App (PWA) and can be installed directly on the phone or tablet.
Log in with a service provider (Google, Microsoft, Github) or create a new Mail account.

You are ready to Create your first Face now.

Creating a new face can be done from scratch or by copying a face from the pool of shared faces.