Wear OS

How to use a Wear OS watch on your right wrist and invert the UI 180 degrees

Ben Schoon | Feb 28 2020 - 1:44 pm PT

Google’s Wear OS isn’t the most feature-packed platform, but it remains a good option for many who want a stylish smartwatch or just one that connects well to their Android phone. One thing Google never properly added support for, though, is inverting the UI so you can wear a Wear OS watch on your right-hand wrist. Here’s how to do that.

Officially, the only way to use a Wear OS watch on your right-hand wrist is to simply deal with the watch being upside-down. This typically means all of the buttons are facing toward your body instead of toward your actual wrist. If you’re comfortable with that, go for it! However, there’s a better way.

If you want to use a Wear OS watch on your right wrist and flip the UI around 180 degrees, it’s actually much easier than you’d think.

How to flip Wear OS’ UI 180 degrees to wear your watch on your right wrist

To accomplish this, we’re going to download a third-party app by the name of “Lefty” from the Google Play Store. This app is designed for one purpose and one purpose only — to invert the UI of Wear OS. To do this, the app uses a handful of Android permissions that you’ll need to accept. Once opening the app for the first time, it will request that you enable it to draw over other apps and modify the system. Finally, you’ll be asked to turn on Accessibility for “Lefty.”

All of these permissions will need to be turned on

After those permissions have been accepted, tapping the purple “Rotate” button in the app will invert Wear OS’ entire UI 180°, making everything better if you prefer to wear your watch on your right-hand wrist. This will affect apps, your watchface, the settings, basically everything on the watch. Some users mention that battery-saving modes and a few other features might briefly break the app from time to time, but overall it works great.

I’m not a right-hand Wear OS wearer, but I’ve tried the app out so far on a couple of different models and I haven’t run into any issues.