A bug is messing up watch faces on Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch models
Wear OS 6 isn't playing nice with third-party faces.
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
TL;DR
- A bug in Wear OS 6 is causing problems with third-party watch faces.
- The issue seems to affect all Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch models on Wear OS 6 and 6.1.
- There isn’t a real fix, but you can avoid the issue for now by using pre-installed watch faces.
Wear OS 6.1 hit Pixel Watch devices earlier this month, bringing a handful of improvements along with it. But users are reporting that both the latest version on Pixel Watch and Wear OS 6-based One UI 8 Watch on Galaxy Watch are interacting with third-party watch faces in a particularly annoying way, making the watches worse at, well, being watches.
As PiunikaWeb tells it, users have been reporting on both Google and Samsung forums that, on Wear OS 6 and 6.1, third-party watch faces have been getting caught between their always-on display versions and the full watch face that shows when the watch is unlocked. Elements from the AOD face linger after the watch is unlocked, making the full watch face harder to read.
Apparently the problem doesn’t present itself immediately, but users say that once a third-party watch face has been applied for some time, both Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch devices can start to show semi-transparent versions of their AOD layouts over top of the normal watch face. Both Google and Samsung have acknowledged the issue; a Google IssueTracker case about the bug has been open since October.
This behavior only happens with watch faces that weren’t pre-installed on devices, and it appears to be related to a change in Wear OS 6 that adjusts the way watches transition from AOD layouts to full watch faces. It seems to be affecting all Galaxy Watch and Pixel Watch models with Wear OS 6 or 6.1 installed.
If you’ve got a watch running Wear OS 6 or later and you’ve noticed your watch rendering watch faces incorrectly, this could be your issue. Swapping from one third-party watch face to another seems to temporarily solve the problem, but a definitive fix hasn’t been found yet. Addressing the problem permanently may require changes by Google to Wear OS itself. For now, you can avoid this weird display behavior by sticking to pre-installed watch faces.
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