Application session and enhancement for a wearable electronic device

A non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions which, when executed by one or more processors of a wearable electronic device, cause the wearable electronic device to perform operations including:

• receiving an interaction to transition an application to a front-most state on the wearable electronic device;
• receiving a request to initiate an activity via the application in the front-most state;
• detecting that the wearable electronic device has transitioned to an inactive or screen-off state;
• and
• enabling enhanced functionality for the application in the front-most state during the inactive or screen off state while the application is in the front-most state, wherein the application is a persistent application having a display persistence level and the enhanced functionality for the persistent application is enabled according to the display persistence level.

A data processing system on a wearable electronic device, the data processing system comprising:

• one or more processors;
• a non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions to cause the one or more processors to:
• receive a first application programming interface (API) call from an application to perform a first action on the wearable electronic device;
• begin a session on the wearable electronic device in response to a first determination that the first API call is associated with a beginning of a session;
• determine, based on the application, a display persistence level to apply to the application;
• flag the application associated with the session as a persistent application based on the display persistence level determined for the persistent application;
• and
• display the persistent application at a next activation of the wearable electronic device in place of a default application associated with the wearable electronic device.