Built by a professionally-trained software engineer

LuxeLion’s primary developer was trained at Princeton and Harvard and is a full-time software engineer. This means your watch faces are built to a higher level of precision and architectural quality than hobbyists and amateurs.

Some of the benefits of our professional software engineering include:

• Longer battery life from more efficient usage of system resources
• Richer capabilities included within the tight space requirements imposed by Garmin
• Decreased likelihood of bugs, glitches, and errors
• Increased capability to continue receiving updates and improvements over time

Extended battery life

A common complaint about ConnectIQ watch faces is that they drain your battery. We spent hundreds of hours in research and development to solve this problem.

Our specialized technology allows all our watch faces to make economical use of your watch’s battery. Part of the reason we can do this is because we only build for Garmin’s modern (2022+) devices that have special capabilities to support these efforts. One such technology is Garmin’s Buffered Bitmaps.

When you download a face built for older devices (such as a Fenix 6), you’re getting a watch face that wasn’t likely built to use these modern features. Instead of “painting” only what has changed to the screen on each update, they have to paint all the details of the watch face every second and minute.

LuxeLion’s watch faces pre-paint the parts of the face that don’t change and store this for easy use. Then, each second or minute, the watch face only has to paint the parts that change.

This is just one of our numerous battery-saving technologies. Many others are our “secret sauce.”

Obsessive attention to detail

We craft our watch faces with an extraordinary attention to detail. That includes visual features that you’ll only notice if you look closely. It also includes architectural systems that are more efficient with your battery.

Here are some examples. What other ones can you catch?

✋

Each watch face we sell is sold “at a loss.” We’ll never recover the investment we made, but your purchases support our continued work. Do you want to support our work, get greater influence over our roadmap, and get more behind-the-scenes access? Consider becoming a LuxeLion premium member:

LuxeLion Premium Garmin Watch Faces | Patreon

Premium digital watch faces for Garmin smartwatches

patreon.com

Proprietary color research

We conduct original research to ensure your watch face is built to exquisite perfection.

For example, we undertook color psychology research to determine valid color combinations with sufficient contrast. This is especially important on MIPs screens, where contrast is so important to legibility and accessibility.

The below image shows a part of the LuxeLion “MIPS-safe color combination” table. Color combinations that will be difficult to read score a low number (the lowest is 1.0, which means there’s no contrast). Combinations with the highest contrast score above 9.0. 19.56 is the highest contrast on this scale, which is achieved by the combination of pure white and pure black.

Support for numerous metrics

We’ve built extensive support for metrics, including some proprietary ones. We support 30+ metrics, and we’re always considering adding more.

One challenging part about developing for Garmin devices is that Garmin doesn’t share all their metrics for use on watch faces.

For example, Garmin doesn’t provide the following metrics, which we’ve had to calculate independently for inclusion:

• Moon phase percent
• Moon phase name
• Active calories
• Week number

We’ve built an incredibly efficient system for combining Garmin built-in metrics with proprietary metrics.

Unit conversion support

Our customers come from all around the world. We’ve built a sophisticated system for letting you choose your preferred units for our metrics. That includes the option to detect your preferences on the device, and you can also override those settings directly for each watch face. We then convert the metrics with high precision into your preferred units.

Non-latin character support

While our engineering is based in the USA, we serve a majority-international clientele. When we include custom fonts on our devices for stylistic reasons, we strive to support as many languages as possible. But not all specialty fonts have full support for all glyphs. As a result, we’ve developed special technology that allows customers to use system fonts to support your needs.

Rendering icons using a custom font

Images are very expensive to store and paint to Garmin watch faces. In addition, Garmin’s app platform doesn’t provide the ability to change the color of images before drawing them to the screen, so there’s no way to allow users to customize the color of icons painted this way.

We found a clever hack using Garmin’s font system. Garmin’s software is optimized for rendering text via fonts, which can be drawn in any color. We created our own font, replacing letters with our custom-made icons. The result is a more compact way to deliver icons, faster icon drawing, and the ability to draw icons in any supported device color.

Compression algorithm for weather icon library

One of the tiny details you may notice is highly-accurate weather icons, both day and night. Here’s why:

Garmin provides 54 different possible weather conditions ranging from “Clear” to “Hurricane.” In addition, some weather conditions that show the sun also have a night version that shows the moon, instead (see the second row of icons in the image above). That’s a lot of icons to keep track of!

Storing these icons required a lot of code to associate each weather condition with its icon. It was taking away code space that could be used to deliver other features. Therefore, we invented a compression system that stores 4 different icons inside the space ordinarily requires to store just one. This compression system allows us to keep all these gorgeous icons without sacrificing the ability to build more advanced capabilities.

You can see these icions in the LuxeLion Current Weather and Feels Like metrics.

Full weather condition names

Just like there are dozens of icons to store, there are also dozens of condition names to store. On some of our faces with a text display (like the Coquette Sport), you can display the name of the current weather condition.

Garmin’s memory constraints are so tight that storing 54 different weather condition names in the code has a measurable impact. Therefore, we’ve designed a specialized compression system to store this information in a way that isn’t actually defined in the code. This optimization results in a powerful capability with minimal cost.

Powerful on-device settings menu

On certain life adventures, it’s just not easy or practical to carry (or find) your phone. That’s why we’ve invested substantial work into creating a powerful on-device settings capability. This allows you to change most important characteristics of the watch without a phone.

Superior purchase and license experience

For good reason, Garmin restricts what developers can do for security and battery reasons. However, this makes it very challenging to create great experiences like you’d expect from other platforms like phone apps or web apps.

For example, Garmin only permits one internet check at most every 5 minutes. That means sometimes making customers wait for certain internet-enabled capabilities, such as licensing.

We’ve built a licensing system to make this a smooth and easy process. That includes status information about these wait times. And even if something goes wrong, we provide helpful error messages and an on-device debugging capability.

Hold-to-open Support

We’re always monitoring Garmin’s latest releases for ways to bring new capabilities to you. One recent addition was the ability for watch faces to know when the customer was tapping & holding a spot on the watch face (for watches with touchscreen support). This is now a standard part of all LuxeLion watch faces.

Learn more about which metrics support this capability here:

👆Hold-to-Open (HTO)

Proprietary development tools

One frustrating problem in the Garmin Connect IQ app store is that developers with many faces often stop supporting and updating their watch faces. That’s because it becomes very difficult for a developer to manage many watch faces.

We’ve developed two special tools to improve our ability to support numerous watch faces for the long-haul:

The first is the 🌐LuxeLion Platform , which all our watch faces use. This is just like the way mechanical watch manufacturers establish their “calibres” (or “movements”) that are then shared across their line of products. Having a shared heart means that when we improve the core platform, all our watch faces benefit.

The next special tool is our highly advanced build and deployment system. This highly-custom system allows us to easily automate the tedious and error-prone parts of the build & deployment process. This reduces the time it takes us to ship updates to you. And it reduces the chance of human error resulting in bugs or issues.

Direct Engagement with Garmin Engineers

LuxeLion works directly with Garmin’s engineering team to support the Connect IQ platform. We receive pre-release SDK versions in advance of release in order to provide reassurance to the Garmin team that the SDK is stable. Coupled with our advanced automated build and testing system, we’re able to provide rapid stability feedback to the Garmin team as they prepare to launch new versions of the Connect IQ SDK.

This close connection ensures that our watch faces are always using the latest Garmin SDKs and optimized.

Community engagement