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Wear OS 6 reintroduced custom watch faces to Android watches, with apps like Facer, WatchMaker, and TIMEFLIK providing the Galaxy Watch 8 and Pixel Watch 4 with a massive selection of faces. Other Wear OS watches won't get the update for some time, and trying out dozens of custom watch faces only made it clearer how exciting an exclusive feature this is.
After restricting old, battery-guzzling watch faces in Wear OS 5 with Watch Face Format (WFF), Google worked with Facer and other apps on a solution: the Watch Face Push API.
With Wear OS 6, each watch face app gets one "slot" in your watch's favorites menu, visible by tapping and holding the display. Pick a watch face in the mobile app, and it pushes onto that slot. Your watch's storage isn't cluttered with old faces because your latest pick overwrites the old one.
You can use as many watch face apps as are compatible with Wear OS 6, but since most of them require a subscription for the best faces, you'll probably want to stick with just one. So, I looked through the options in Facer, TIMEFLIK, WatchMaker, and Pujie to see which stood out.
Facer
Facer Premium: $40/year or $5/month
Facer is crammed with unofficial faces for popular brands like Pokémon, Totoro, Zelda, and Star Wars. However, Facer also has official brand partners, including SpongeBob, Garfield, Barbie, Star Trek, and Tetris, as well as "Watchmaker" faces designed to mimic luxury watch faces. You'll find plenty of high-quality designs to tempt you, along with the more amateurish ones.
The best aspect of Facer is that each face has a "power impact" rating, which warns you if it will affect your watch's battery life. You can also tap a Sun/Moon icon to swap between the active and AOD layout, checking in advance if the latter isn't too battery-intensive.
Facer has a wide range of Wear OS 6-compatible faces, and at least 100 are free if you want to try the app out without committing to Premium; considering Samsung and Google have about 60 and 30 official faces, respectively, that's nothing to sneeze at — even if the best options are paid.
There's also the Facer Creator tool, where you can create your own custom designs; it's meant for publishing faces for people to download or buy, but you can simply save your designs to your account's "My Designs" folder and upload them to your watch.
WatchMaker
WatchMaker VIP: $20/year or $5/month
WatchMaker has hundreds of thousands of WFF faces, though only 30 free ones at any one time. They do seem to switch from day to day, so you can try different ones, but can't save them. Generally speaking, you'll want to pay for the annual sub to use this app.
Like Facer, there's a wide range of casual user-made faces, and you can make your own with the "New Watch" button in the main menu — though you'll need to pay a separate, lifetime "Premium" fee of $12 to add your own custom images and get other design tools.
What makes WatchMaker tempting is that it has a large collection of curated face collections that emphasize a "classic" or "chic" aesthetic, perfect for my Galaxy Watch 8 Classic. The Knight Watch collection, in particular, looks really impressive, with years' worth of striking designs that will keep your watch looking fresh and unique.
The app UI isn't my favorite. The main menu is full of links to other apps instead of useful info, and the confusing split between Premium and VIP feels like a way to trick me into paying twice for things. But 130,000+ WFF faces could make you overlook these annoyances.
TIMEFLIK
Flik Pass Pro: $60/year or $5/month
If you're solely interested in finding free watch faces, TIMEFLIK is where you should start. You can find hundreds (if not more) of free WFF-compatible faces with a toggle on the main Home view or the "Top Free" view in the Popular tab.
Where nearly every face is paid in Facer and WatchMaker by design, TIMEFLIK will typically have a handful of free faces for every well-known pop culture or gaming icon you could think of, as well as people's personal drawings, photos, and AI slop.
The immediate downside to TIMEFLIK is that you need to watch an ad for every watch face you send to your watch, unless you pay $2.49/month. Since only one watch face is saved at a time, that means an ad every time you switch, even if it's one you've used before.
Outside of a few faces that rip off luxury watch looks, most of TIMEFLIK's paid and recommended faces tend to be on the amateurish side. That's not a bad thing if you're snagging a few paid faces that strike your fancy, but I'm not sure what'll justify spending $60/year for TIMEFLIK (after the first $10 annual pass deal).
Pujie
Pujie Premium: $2/month or $5 one-time payment
Pujie's second watch face app is specifically designed for Wear OS 6. It feels more restrained and indie than the others, with total downloads and comments visible under each face to give a sense of what the community thinks.
I like the simplicity of the main Gallery, which breaks down faces into categories like Trending, Popular designers, Complication overload, and so on. They're curated to highlight specific styles, such as analog vs. digital, that you may prefer.
You'll find about 20 free watch faces. Otherwise, being able to pay $5 for all current and future watch faces is a pretty good deal, considering that's how much you'll pay monthly on other apps — even if Pujie has fewer faces than other apps.
Even though I found Pujie's face collection to be very community-driven, one — a nice way of saying many of them are just okay — the top curated picks are great, and the complex watch face designer will let you make your own if you're dedicated enough to try.
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