Samsung’s new Galaxy Watches have just debuted, which include the Galaxy Watch 7 and the Watch Ultra, with brighter displays, new 3 nm chipsets, and most importantly, the new One UI Watch 6.0 based on Google’s WearOS 5.
However, a disappointing limitation on the new Galaxy smartwatches might trouble users of older generations because new watches run on WearOS 5.0 out-of-the-box, and they lack support for older watch faces.
This issue cannot be blamed on Samsung since Google is partly to blame. This limitation arises due to the adoption of Google’s new Watch Face Format (WFF) on WearOS 5.0, which makes many older watch faces incompatible with the new software version.
For reference, WFF is a new method of designing watch faces released by Google in May 2023, a declarative XML format used to design the appearance and behavior of watch faces. This does away with the need for executable code to create watch faces for the platform, which handles the logic needed to render the watch face by itself.
Users of older generations of Galaxy watches are not yet affected by this change since they are currently on WearOS 4, which has not made the WFF logic mandatory. Hence, users of these older watches can continue using any watch faces made for WearOS 2 and upwards. However, when these users update to WearOS 5 or buy any new smartwatch on WearOS 5, some of the older watch faces they were using may no longer be supported.
This also applies to users transferring data from an older WearOS smartwatch to a new Galaxy Watch 7 or Watch Ultra, where all the old data would appear on the new watch except for the unsupported watch faces.
It is currently unclear how many developers have re-coded their watch faces for the new format, so if you are using an older watch face on your current smartwatch, it may not be supported on the new Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra until the developer upgrades the code to the new WFF logic used for WearOS 5.
