Apple executives say they don't plan to build a third-party store for the Apple Watch watch face

A few days ago, two Apple executives recently detailed some of the optimizations made specifically for watchOS to adapt to the Apple Watch Series 7 and some of the decisions they made for third parties. Alan Dye, Apple's vice president of interfaces, and Stan Ng, vice president of product marketing, recently sat down with CNET to explain some of the small changes Apple has made to its watchOS platform for the larger display of the Apple Watch Series 7.

One of the main reasons Apple has raised the screen size of new wearables, for example, is that it makes text easier to read from a barrier-free perspective.

"We have the opportunity to have users increase the dot size (of the text), even larger than we have allowed in the past. This is largely driven by the new display," Dye said, adding that the larger size would be more useful and more accessible to many users who only needed a larger point size.

Ng also talked about how the slightly curved edges on the new Apple Watch Series 7 create a subtle wrap-around effect. With the lightly redesigned crystal, Apple has been able to create more dome shapes on the new model, which actually helps to improve durability and thicker screen crystals.

As a result, Apple's team decided to turn to designing a new watch surface and tweak watchOS to accommodate and take advantage of the new display.

Dye said: "Once we started using this new crystal and display, all these subtle design decisions were made here, pushing these tick marks to the very edge of the display to highlight some of those effects. ”

Regarding the new on-screen keyboard, Dye notes that Apple doesn't pursue the precision of percussion because it has built-in smart features to help write out information.

Despite the increased screen space, Apple executives say the company still sees the Apple Watch as a companion to a short-lived device — the iPhone.

"I think a lot of those core fundamental values around how we manage watching news remain the same. While we can allow more content on the display, we still think of it as a scannable, smaller, less interactive product than one like a phone or, of course, the iPad. ”

Apple isn't "about you spending 30 minutes looking at your phone and social media, or spending an hour working on a file on your Mac," Ng said. Rather, it's about hundreds of quick glances about the relevant information that might be available at a particular moment.

The two Apple executives also explained why the company didn't create a third-party store for the watch face — and why it doesn't have any plans to do so in the future.

"Even though the hardware is crucial in differentiating the role of the Apple Watch, we think the watch surface also plays a pretty big role there, which is why over the years we've been very careful, despite the wide variety but with a lot of consistent design elements," Dye says. We think we've struck a very good balance. The watch face itself, they certainly provide a canvas for third parties as well as a template that they can create multiple complications and turn the watch face into their watch face, which in some ways becomes the interface of their application. ”