Apple could be eyeing a round display as it plans smartwatch refresh

Ever since Apple started making smartwatches, the company has remained loyal to a rectangular design format for the screen. In the meantime, Google’s Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) has seen brands experiment with circular as well as rectangular screens on smartwatches. Well, it seems Apple is ready for a design overhaul, and it could finally serve a round display on its eponymous smartwatch down the road.

According to Bloomberg, the company is eying a reset of its wearable device efforts, and one of the ideas being floated internally is a round display for smartwatches. The company is considering new devices with no displays, as well as different types of screens and various sizes. While unlikely to hit the market, round screens have even been considered.

The planned shift has been years in the making. Apple was awarded the patent for a round smartwatch all the way back in 2018, while the patent application was first awarded in 2017. Now, switching to a round display on a smartwatch is not a straightforward process. The entire user interface of the wearable operating system has to be optimized for interactions on a round screen instead of a square.

Think of it like creating adaptive apps that can open in a single-pane or dual-pane view, depending on whether you are looking at them on the slab-like screen of a traditional phone, or the large rectangular screen on a foldable phone. In the case of smartwatches, it’s a tad more complicated because you are not enlarging the screen area. You are simply rounding off the straight edges, and that leaves app developers with a design conundrum.

The biggest challenge? Notifications and banners. “The Pixel Watch 4 addresses this by opting for a square display in the software, and the round display cuts off different parts of text as you scroll. It’s fairly elegant, but also fairly rudimentary in its approach. Samsung takes a different approach, with the Galaxy Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch 8 series featuring a framed square screen atop a round body,” noted a Digital Trends analysis from not too long ago.

Apple, however, has all the resources in the world to make it happen, and there is definitely a yearning for a round Apple Watch, especially from purists who can’t stand the sight of rectangular or square dials. It would be interesting to see how Apple tackles the challenge of a round UI format, assuming it proceeds with the vision of a circular dial on its smartwatch(es).