Watch Face Studio is compatible with all Wear OS watch devices running API level 30 and higher. If you create a watch face in Watch Face Studio, you can use it on all Wear OS watch devices, regardless of manufacturer. However, because of limitations with deprecated APIs, your watch face may not be available on devices that are still using deprecated APIs.

The Galaxy Watch Studio serves Tizen’s Galaxy Watch 1, 2, and 3.

In Watch Face Studio, the watch shape is set to a circle by default. To support other watch face shapes, disable the Apply circular crop option in the watch face canvas properties. When circular crop is disabled, the watch face shape is determined by the user’s device.

To ensure watch face components display correctly, avoid placing components directly on the edges of the watch face. The image can shift on some devices to prevent screen burn-in.

Watch Face Studio creates a project with a single screen resolution, but the created watch face supports all device resolutions.

You can reduce battery usage through the following strategies:

• Use darker colors on the watch face.
• Make sure the images are fitted to the screen.
• Make sure you have removed all unused layers before building the watch face package.

For more information, see Performance tips.

Using too many components in your watch face can degrade the performance of the watch face and consume the device battery more. To optimize the use of components:

• Make sure fewer than 8 complications are visible in both ambient and normal modes.
• Make sure there are no hidden layers in either ambient or normal modes.

The second hand is not supported in ambient mode. Design your watch face to hide the second hand in ambient mode.

The on-pixel ratio (OPR) varies between device models. To find the OPR for a specific device, check the device specification. To examine the on-pixel performance of your design in ambient mode for various device shapes, In the Run preview, select Analyze. You can also analyze the on-pixel performance for circular devices when you use the Run on Device and Publish features in Watch Face Studio.

To enable watch face customization, define themes and styles for the watch face in the Style property window. The user can select from the themes and styles you have defined.

You can define a theme color palette and apply those colors to the component layers. You can also implement multiple images for the Analog Hands, Image, Multimedia, and Index components.

Remember to give each component and style a clear, descriptive name. The names appear when the user uses the Customize mode to personalize their watch face. You can also implement localized component names using text IDs. For more information, see Project Settings.

• The [SC] tag is the measured step count.
• The [SC_GOAL] tag represents the step goal. The user’s step goal can be synchronized from a supported health application, or you can define a step goal for the watch face. To configure the step goal for your watch face, in WFS, go to File > Project > Settings > Health.
• The [SC_PER] tag is the percentage of the step goal achieved, automatically calculated from the step count and step goal.

Watch faces can be sold in unsupported countries through the device manufacturer’s own app store. For example, watch faces for Galaxy Watch can be sold through Galaxy Apps. For more information, see Galaxy Store Seller portal.

Different app stores can support different file types for watch faces, such as APK or AAB. You must create the appropriate watch face package for each store.

Check that your wearable device supports Bluetooth debugging. Debug over Bluetooth is not supported on Wear 3 devices. For more information, see Debug over Bluetooth.

Lottie files are no longer supported since Watch Face Studio version 1.4.13. You must replace them with animations in a supported format, such as WebP or animated GIF.

The Sync to device feature enables your watch face to use the step goal defined by the user on their device’s health application. It is supported on watch devices running API Level 33 and higher (Wear 4 and later).

On Wear 3 devices, because Sync to device is not supported, the step goal is fixed to 6000. If you want to set a different step goal for Wear 3 devices, you must create a separate watch face version for Wear 3, disable Sync to device, and define the step goal directly.

Some tag expressions and features related to measuring heart rate on Wear OS watch devices running API level 30 are not supported by Watch Face Studio v1.4.13. However, WFS supports synchronizing the measured heart rate value with the value displayed on the screen.

On Wear OS watch devices running API level 33 and higher and Galaxy Watch devices for Wear OS powered by Samsung, the Open app feature supports opening the health application to view heart rate information on those devices.

In Watch Face Studio, complications must be implemented independently. They cannot be grouped with or be part of another element. Complications can only contain elements within them.