Facer’s announcement on the CES stage revealed a series of upgrades and a major platform expansion, which include bringing its leading watch face marketplace and creator tools to RTOS-based wearables at large. The move expands Facer beyond high OS-tier devices and in front of a large audience of affordable, battery-conscious smartwatches.
Facer reaches RTOS wearables through key partnerships
The headline change here is Facer landing on RTOS watches. It will be preinstalled on Reebok’s forthcoming Kinetic smartwatch, which is powered by VitalOS with MicroEJ VEE Wear, marking a ready-made onramp for users and developers. Just as importantly, Facer is also teaming up with LVGL, the popular open-source graphics library for embedded devices. That integration ought to make it easy for brands that already build RTOS interfaces with LVGL — and names like Xiaomi are among those — to add Facer-compatible faces to their lineups.
The companies building RTOS devices have traditionally focused more on stamina and cost over a wide range of app ecosystems. By isolating face design from the OS down to LVGL and MicroEJ VEE layers, Facer is establishing itself as the creative layer that runs on any hardware without compromising performance.
Face Chime debuts alongside new platform integrations
When it comes to features, Facer added Face Chime for creators to use, which is a customizable hourly chime feature for watch faces. It’s a modest-sounding change that has outsized appeal for smartwatch wearers who value ambient cues — think the classic hourly strikes of an analog watch, but now with personalizable tones and conditions. Face Chime is rolling out on Wear OS 6, Facer tells me, and it adds updated support for hundreds of existing faces — a nice bit of candy for both new users and longtime ones. Samsung has a similar system-level functionality with Space Chime, but the third-party flexibility on Wear OS has been hit-or-miss; Face Chime fills that void for developers.
Facer also unveiled a partnership with Citizen’s Riiiver platform. Riiiver bridges watch interactions with online data and smart-device controls — in other words, surfaces that can show live sports scores or evoke a smart light scene with a tap or fetch you a rideshare ETA, for example. For creators, it turns a face from static art into a flexible control surface; for brands, it’s an avenue to sticky, utility-driven experiences without full-blown apps.
Why Facer’s RTOS expansion matters for wearables
RTOS wearables lead the entry and mid tiers where long battery life and low component cost are important. Market trackers like Counterpoint Research have long said that it’s the affordable models, especially in Asia and emerging markets, which account for market share. Most of these run proprietary firmware or RTOS rather than high-level OSes, and they traditionally don’t offer rich customizability. Facer’s growth fills a marked void: it introduces an established design ecosystem to watches that previously had virtually no selection of faces.
There’s also a community flywheel. Facer’s app has been installed over 10 million times on Google Play, and its marketplace boasts hundreds of thousands of designs from independent artists and brands. Extending that catalog to RTOS hardware provides manufacturers an instant library; for creators, it means a larger addressable market and new monetization opportunities without the tedium involved in starting from scratch on yet another platform.
Support for AOSP-powered watches is arriving soon
Facer says it’ll soon support smartwatches based on AOSP, a minor category that hasn’t really bloomed into something yet. In principle, AOSP wearables should enable device manufacturers to customize Android without incurring the full cost of a high-level wearable OS or dependency on platform-specific service stacks. If that category comes into focus, Facer’s early commitment means it gets to be the default customization layer for its partners and have a working ecosystem from day one.
What the expansion means for users, creators, and brands
For customers, the bottom line is this: more choice, more personality, and more utility on more watches — from high-end Wear OS hardware to mass-market RTOS models. For creators, it’s a broader canvas with better tools that includes integrations with Face Chime and Riiiver to make faces feel alive. As for manufacturers, particularly those shipping high-volume RTOS devices, Facer provides an instant design marketplace that can increase perceived value without affecting battery life or performance.
The smartwatch market is splintering by design, price, and software. By playing nice with RTOS, Wear OS, and possibly AOSP devices now, Facer is betting that a universal face ecosystem can be the connective tissue — and growth engine — over that fragmentation.
