Wear OS 5 Only Likes Certain Watch Faces, So Your Old Ones Might Not Work

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.

// Google