The Galaxy Watch 7 series launched today as the first with Wear OS 5, Google’s newest wearable operating system. I’m sure the Pixel Watch line will get it before long, so Google is sharing news related to watch faces on the platform. In short, some of your old watch faces are about to stop working because of new standards set for Wear OS 5.
Over a year ago, Google introduced the Watch Face Format as the standard for watch faces going forward from Wear OS 4. The idea was to allow for developers and designers to more easily create watch faces that were high quality, require less updates, and perform better. With the launch of Wear OS 5, Google will now require watch faces meet certain performance and quality standards, which essentially means they need to be built through the Watch Face Format.
What does this mean for your old watch faces? Well, if your watch isn’t running Wear OS 5, all of your old watch faces will still work. However, if you get a new watch that has Wear OS 5 on it or you update an older watch to Wear OS 5, some older watch faces simply won’t be available any longer and will drop from your watch.
Does that suck? Yeah, so you may want to reach out to your watch face developers and see if they can’t get to work on porting their work over to the Watch Face Format.
ruh roh… wonder what that means for basic watch faces in things like WatchMaker.
That would be a huge downside for me if so, I don't use anything with complications or what-not, just basic watch face scans and reproductions of class time piece watch faces (like Skagen, Omega, etc…) with always-on screen so that at idle my smartwatch looks like a classic watch that I've imported from watch to watch (and phone to phone) over the years via WatchMaker app
Price of progress. Too many junk Facer watch faces out there killing battery life.