Wear OS 3 is now rolling out to Skagen Falster Gen 6, strips away watch faces

Ben Schoon | Jan 12 2023 - 8:13 am PT

Skagen Falster Gen 6 was one of the last great smartwatches to launch with Wear OS 2, but it’s now eligible for Wear OS 3 as the upgrade is rolling out to owners.

Wear OS 3 was confirmed to be an optional update to select legacy Wear OS watches, with the Falster Gen 6 included on that list. Skagen’s latest watch, released early last year, came with the compatible Snapdragon 4100+ chipset that enabled support for Google’s latest OS.

As many owners have noted over on Reddit, Wear OS 3 is now rolling out quite widely to Skagen Falster Gen 6. I haven’t been able to pull down the update on my Falster just yet, but that might have something to do with this being the first time it’s been turned on since July.

Wear OS 3 for Skagen Falster Gen 6 is pretty much what most folks expected it to be, mirroring Fossil’s stock-ish take on the platform that we’ve seen on other Gen 6 smartwatches. You’ll find a UI that looks a lot like what’s on Google’s Pixel Watch, as well as Fossil’s handful of tweaks such as battery-saver modes. There are also some losses, including Google Assistant having been removed as Google hasn’t released it widely for Wear OS 3 yet. The Montblanc Summit 3 and other Fossil watches are dealing with the same loss of support. Alexa is available, though.

Notably, too, this update also removes watch faces from Skagen’s catalog. Where Skagen previously offered 20 different, built-in watch faces on the Falster Gen 6, there are only eight remaining after the Wear OS 3 upgrade. We’ll add a full list of remaining watch faces once we’ve been able to upgrade our unit.

The move to Wear OS 3 on Skagen Falster Gen 6 also does away with the old Wear OS app, moving users over to Skagen’s own app which closely mirrors Fossil’s app.

To upgrade to Wear OS 3 on your Falster, head into Settings > System > About > System Updates. Tapping on that screen a few times can sometimes force the update, but your results may vary. Older Skagen Falster smartwatches are not eligible for this update.