I’m not big into the crazier Apple Watch faces — the ones that try to fill your watch’s face with the time, data points, and other icons you tap to access this or that.
But even though I’m a purist, I’ve installed the third-party complication Better Day ($2.99) and switched to a slightly more data-heavy face, because this third-party complication gives you a much better calendar experience for your Apple Watch than Apple’s.
For a reasonable price, Better Day gives you a customisable icon (or tappable text) that you can set to show the current month, the weekday and day, the month and day, or all three. Tap it, and you’re then taken to a big calendar, and you can scroll through its months using your Digital Crown (or through years by flicking your finger to the left or right).
Yes, this means that you can’t just tap on an icon to see your day’s listing of events — not unless you pair Better Day with Apple’s standard Calendar complication, too. I think both are fine to have on an Apple Watch: One for a daily digest and one to see what day a particular date lies on (for example).
If you need calendars that align with your international travels (or home) — because some countries like to start the week on Sunday, not Monday, for example — you’re also probably covered by Better Day, which also offers customised calendars in 21 different languages.
And all those icons (or tappable text) you can drop on your various watch faces? You can even customise their colour, assuming your face supports it. Castillo just updated the app to support the brand-new Apple Watch 4, which means more accent colours for you to play with and a bunch of new visualisations.
The only downside with Better Day is that it’s a little fussy to set up. Make sure you install the app on your supported iPhone and make sure the app’s Apple Watch version is also installed. You might have to switch to customising your current face via your Apple Watch, rather than the Watch app, in order to get Better Day to appear.
Even though the whole installation bug is quirky, I appreciate that developer Joey Castillo has been trying to work it out — at least, based on all the responses I’ve seem him post on social media lately. That’s a lot of legwork for an app that only costs $2.99, which is itself a steal compared to buying some wall calendar of cute animals from one of those kiosks at a shopping centre.
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