Facer is working with Google to bring its watch faces to Wear OS 5, some already available

Ben Schoon | Oct 16 2024 - 12:35 pm PT

Google has made a huge change to how watch faces work in Wear OS 5, and it’s led to Facer, one of the most popular watch face marketplaces, not working.

Facer has long provided a huge library of watch faces to Android smartwatches. Across Wear OS and Tizen, before Samsung switched, the app brought hundreds of watch face options, in many cases from third-party designers. Many of those watch faces also supported additional features, animations, and more.

However, Facer is not compatible with the latest version of Wear OS.

Google introduced “Watch Face Format” last year before mandating it. The XML-based format is designed to require “less maintenance and fewer updates” compared to previous methods, as well as improving battery life for users. However, that breaks some older watch faces as the new format cannot have any “executable code or code embedded in the watch face APK.” Sometime in 2025, Google will even block new watch faces from being published on the Play Store if they don’t use this format.

Facer runs into a few problems with Watch Face Format, as explained on a support page (via Android Central). Firstly, that all faces must be individually submitted to the Play Store – currently, Facer has over 500,000 faces available. This would also be a problem for paid faces, as users would be forced to re-purchase faces they’ve already bought. Facer’s subscription model also wouldn’t work with this.

But, even if those problems were overcome, Facer says that the current state of Watch Face Format would result in “loss of functionality in a number of cases.”

Facer says that it has been working with Google for some time to come up with a solution, but that nothing has been worked out just yet. As such, smartwatches such as Pixel Watch 3, Galaxy Watch 7, and others that have been updated to Wear OS 5 are not supported by Facer.

We understand these issues are detrimental to Facer users and we have been actively discussing a resolution with Google since the Watch Face Format was announced last year. The change was unfortunately rolled out before a solution could be reached.

For existing watches, users can hold off on upgrading to Wear OS 5 to continue using Facer. For newer watches, Facer says that it will “progressively bring some of our best watch faces to you in the Google Play Store” under the Watch Face Format, but there’s no word on which ones will make the jump. So far, a handful have arrived on the Play Store including Starfield, Star Trek, TMNT, and “Ultra” faces.