Older watch faces turn off the AoD mode on Wear OS 3 smartwatches

Google’s Wear OS has a huge collection of watch faces that have been developed over the years. However, you might want to stick with the newer ones because, as per 9To5Google, watch faces not using the latest development practices trigger a rather unusual error on smartwatches running Wear OS 3.

Apparently, older watch faces turn off the AOD (Always-On Display) mode after 15 minutes. Folks at 9To5Google tested this with older watch faces like Looks on a Pixel Watch and Fossil Gen 6 Wellness, which came out of the box with Wear OS 3. Speaking of the error, it did not appear on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4.

Always on display is a nice feature because you can have a quick glance at your smartwatch to know the time, weather, temperature, or battery percentage. Having to tap on the screen to wake it up if the raise-to-wake gesture is disabled defeats the purpose of an AoD. It could be more annoying in situations when your hands are preoccupied, and you are glancing at your wrist from an angle.

When this issue was investigated by one developer, it was found that the error impacts clocks that aren’t built using the Jetpack Watch Face library. This is meant to replace the previous Wearable Support Library and go stable in December 2021. In fact, the bug filing notes that the Pixel Watch stock faces use the Jetpack Watch Face library.

Google initially closed the bug report on Friday, but it was reopened on Monday morning, and the good thing is that Google is actually actively looking into the problem. While they may come up with a temporary solution (or a permanent fix!), the long-term solution for this issue would be to have developers modernize their watch faces.

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