First, no I didn’t find a hack to enable this on Apple Watch. Sadly. But, I did implement a Pebble Watch Face that basically does what I want. I have also added clock-based night mode support to my tactical watchface. Seems like Dark Mode is coming at some point on the PebbleOS-Level.

I’m not really a ‘Large Watch’ guy. They look good - but I think they get in the way and I feel like I’m constantly hitting them on things.

The only reason I’d really consider getting a large Apple watch is for the Night mode, on the red OLED screen, which I think looks amazing. In the middle of the night the harsh white of the built-in clock & faces is really annoying. So, let’s vibe-hack some things to see what works!

Apple Watch - Things I tried

• ❌ System-wide color tint - not available like on macOS
• ❌ Watch-face Customization - couldn’t quite get close with just tint alone
• ❌ Colored custom widgets for modular face - still can’t get rid of the built in digital clock.
• ✅ Custom watch app - Kind of, with caveats that mean you can’t publish on App Store.
• ✅ Make a version for my Pebble instead

What can I do?

I can at least make a red-mode hiking clock / GPS app. The only annoyance, is you cannot hide the system menu bar (the clock, sometimes icon), without using a private API (._statusBarHidden()). Which means, you can’t publish to the App Store. Kind of frustrating.

But, this fills what I wanted - a way to look at things like GPS position, time, etc - without hash white lights.

Pebble Watch Face

Similar implementation for pebble watch - which you can control the backlight, so in day light, it’s readable, and at night, it’s not harsh. Nice.

This is what it looks like at night:

Get the watchface here.

I also updated my tactical watch face to have a sunrise/set driven night mode also.

Open Technology

Apple’s hardware is really nice, but it’s really not customizable unless you stay within Apple’s walled garden and the things they want you to do. This is why I like my Pebble Watch, because I can much more easily customize and hack on it.

If Pebble made a watch with a high-res OLED, that’d be sweet. I really like the new metal watches! But I imagine, that’d be at the cost of battery life, and a thicker watch.

It looks like someone’s been working on a native night mode for PebbleOS, which would be really cool if those are eventually finished & released since new watches have a color backlight. (app #265 and os #2092)