Kaitlyn Cimino / Android Authority
Regardless of what smartwatch you wear, there’s no shortage of attractive faces available. From sleek minimalist designs to data-packed dashboards, the appeal of a smartwatch face lies in how much you can tailor your look. But if the watch face is my wearable’s outfit, I rarely change its clothes. Swapping is just clunky enough that weeks go by before I realize I’ve been stuck on the same one, even though I’ve downloaded dozens. That’s why rumored face randomization on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 has me genuinely excited, and I hope other brands are paying attention.
Based on Android Authority’s APK teardown of leaked One UI 8 Watch software, Samsung appears to be testing a feature that would let users automatically rotate between saved Galaxy watch faces. Text strings in the software suggest the watch will be able to shuffle between users’ watch faces, as long as two or more are saved. This could take place at set intervals or each time the screen wakes, we can’t confirm exactly how it will work, but it’s a setting no major smartwatch currently offers out of the box. Most platforms, including Wear OS and watchOS, simply let you store and swap between multiple faces, but switching between them is a manual, sometimes even buried task.
Samsung is rumored to be bringing randomized watch face shuffling to the Galaxy Watch 8, and I want it on every wearable.
In other words, watch face randomization would provide a layer of effortless personalization. A robust watch face library is great in theory, but mine is more of a graveyard than a gallery. I infrequently remember to switch things up. Automatically utilizing more faces would give real meaning to the hours I’ve spent scouring the Play Store for fresh builds from indie developers. Our teardown also revealed that Samsung may even make suggestions based on users’ existing collections, making the feature even more dynamic.
Randomizing watch faces may not be a sweeping hardware upgrade or a novel addition, but it’s the kind of overlooked, quality-of-life tweak that could easily become a standard feature across the landscape. I wear a lot of different devices. I don’t wear a lot of faces per device, but Samsung is willing to help. When you consider how many unique Wear OS faces you can find from third-party developers, I appreciate it.
The Wear OS platform, in particular, has too many good developers to let watch faces go stale.
As of now, automation capabilities aren’t clear. There’s no sign (yet) of setting specific faces to specific times, for example, but that’s a logical next step. Personally, I’d love to wake up to a data-packed option including sleep insights and weather, and by the time I hit my desk, have my watch automatically swap to a less distracting, calm aesthetic. In the evening, a fitness-focused pick may nudge me to get moving. And so on. Via Apple’s Focus modes, I can create this pattern on my Apple Watch, and it’s genuinely useful (though the joy I get from seeing my “sleep” watch face suggests I am not going to bed early enough). Yet Apple doesn’t offer nearly the same watch face support and can’t compete with the experience offered by Wear OS watches.
Smartwatches don’t always get huge innovation leaps, but thoughtful, user-centric updates like this can definitely improve daily use. Once it hits Samsung, I hope the idea sticks and spreads.
