Changing watch faces on a smartwatch is pretty much expected these days, especially ever since the Pebble launched, with multiple watch faces available right out of the box, and with support for third-party faces that made it ridiculously easy to download them and show them off. Unfortunately, Android Wear didn’t have that functionality at launch, officially, but Google says that’s changing.

As it stands right now, custom watch faces are not all the rage on Android Wear, simply because there’s no official support for them from Google. Instead, developers are forced to hack them together, which Google has admitted is a bit tricky, suggesting as much with phrases like a “fair bit of tweaking,” to get the message across. On July 17, though, Google confirmed that official support for third-party watch faces is on the way, with the company hard at work on creating an official watch face API.

Because of the work being done, and due to the less-than-official way that third-party watch faces are being created now, Google has also called out to developers to stop posting those watch faces in the Google Play Store, and wait to publish them until there is a stable API out there in the wild. However, Google does say that if you really do need to publish them, then to do so through the Alpha or Beta Channels in the Play Developers Console.

Here’s a slice from the original post, published to Wayne Piekarski’s Google+ page:

“With just a few weeks since the unveiling of the Android Wear SDK, we’ve already seen a number of terrific apps optimized for Android Wear. One of the main questions we’ve heard from you is, “will you support third party custom watch faces?” The answer: yes, for sure! Customization has helped Android thrive, and the same will be true for Android Wear. And to make sure that you’re able to create the richest experience possible, we’re hard at work on a custom watch face API.“

There’s not much of a timetable for the official API. Piekarski says that it’s “coming soon,” but then at the same time notes that it could see the light of day right around the time Android L does, too. So, sometime this fall, and more than likely not this summer.

Have you installed any third-party custom watch faces on your Android Wear device yet?