More Details About Apple Watch Faces in watchOS 3

As I wrote about after WWDC, the Apple Watch Faces are getting some improvements in watchOS 3. Apple Watch faces are important to me, as they are to many other users. I like to switch faces for different looks, moods, and activities throughout the day.

While Apple didn’t open up watch faces to third-party developers as I’d hoped, we did get some pretty nifty updates. I downloaded the watchOS 3 beta on my own watch so I could give you more information than what was presented at WWDC.

Switching wallpapers is easier than ever. You can swipe between faces without force pressing on the face at all. Just swipe right or left to get to the face you want. In reality, I find that method of face-swapping to be fiddly. If you press too lightly when you swipe, nothing happens. If you press too hard, you are back to switching the same way you did in watchOS 2. But when you have iOS 10 on your iPhone (which you must if you’re paired with an Apple Watch running watchOS 3), you can access your watch face collection under the heading My Faces in the My Watch tab. There you can edit and customize faces, as well as pick one and set it to your current Watch Face. To add new faces, open the Face Gallery tab. All of your options are clearly laid out here, so you can customize and add faces to your collection. It’s easier to organize your watch faces on the larger screen of the iPhone.

You’ve heard about the brand new Activity, Minnie Mouse, and Numerals faces. It’s worth noting that one of the three different iterations of the Activity face displays the seconds as well as minutes and hours. This is the first Apple Watch face to display seconds. Minnie and Mickey both speak the time aloud if you tap them. It took me a while to figure out why this wasn’t working for me at first, but I finally figured out that my watch was muted. Minnie and Mickey will only speak if Silent Mode is toggled off in the Control Center, which you can access by swiping up on the Apple Watch.

Additionally, the old faces got new options. For example: the Motion, Photo, Photo Album, and Timelapse faces now allow two complications in addition to the time and date. This is a huge improvement for people like me who depend on complications. I wasn’t using any of those faces very often in watchOS 2 because of their lack of complications. I find myself using them a lot more now due to their increased utility. Even the X-Large face, which used to display nothing but the time, now has the option to include one big complication in the middle.

Here are some of the faces in my new rotation. If you have any questions about the new faces in watchOS 3, or anything else in the beta, tweet me @KarenSFreeman.