In some basement at Google there's a group of traumatized engineers who were flogged mercilessly until they made a smart watch UI work on a round watch face because...??? I've developed Wear OS apps in the amount of effort that it must've taken to get to a sort of alright implementation of a UI that still depends on a lot of lists of things seems crazy to me.

I was discussing this with my wife 10 minutes before I saw this comment.

watch / time / clock looks and works so much better on a round interface. notifications / text / buttons look and work so much better on a square interface.

So, use a watch on one wrist (round, good looking, etc), and a smartwatch on the other wrist (square, functional, 'computer')

There's no way you can mold the two together into one 'have it all' form factor

The round just looks better and far fewer people actively use the interface on the watch other than looking at the time or marking a workout. I think the squircle watches like Apple's look odd.

It's disappointing that this is downvoted when the Apple Watch is an obvious example that rectangular works and is winning. When it comes to watches, I have to admit that I don't understand 99% of what is sold.

Google is an ad company. They don't actually want to lose any of the phone screen time on something with lower revenue real estate.