Flags

I’m Brazilian and I study abroad. I wanted my flag in the corner of my watch face, so I’d see home every time I checked the time. That’s the whole idea.

Measuring before building

watchOS renders a third-party complication in one of three modes. In fullColor you get what you drew. In accented and vibrant the system flattens your view to a single tint, and Apple’s documentation doesn’t say which face gives you which.

A flag rendered in one flat colour isn’t a flag. So before writing the app I wrote a spike that put test views into complication slots and measured the saturation that came back. On watchOS 26.5 the Meridian face’s circular sub-dials hand third-party complications fullColor, at 0.90 to 0.96 mean saturation, carrying all three hues of the Brazilian flag.

The spike was narrower than it first looked, and the write-up says so: it measured SwiftUI shapes and emoji, and the asset-image variant never landed in a slot during the run. That mattered later.

The bug the spike didn’t catch

A watchOS widget extension draws nothing for an image loaded from an asset catalogue. UIImage(named:) returns the image, so nothing looks wrong, and SwiftUI renders empty. The flags had to be loaded another way.

Finding that took longer than fixing it, which is the usual ratio.

What ships

252 countries and territories, 248 with bundled artwork and 4 falling back to emoji, grouped into five continents with none left ungrouped. One archive carries four targets: the iOS app, its widget extension, the watch app and its complication extension. 63 tests, all passing, covering the registry and favourites layer.

It isn’t on the App Store. The build is archived and the listing is uploaded, and until Apple approves it the honest word is unreleased.