If you’re tired of scrolling through dozens of watch faces on your smartwatch, you can follow these steps to hide the ones you do not need.
When a company ships an Android Wear smartwatch, they get to come up with a number of watch faces that come pre-installed on the device. This can be nice as it gives the owner a plethora of choices and styles for the first watch face they choose to go with. However, this can also be annoying because they can include a lot of them. Someone might not like analog watch faces so having them pre-installed on their smartwatch is useless for them.
This generally wouldn’t be a problem, but the user interface of Android Wear leaves much to be desired.
If you have two watch faces that you enjoy, but dislike the others, you could be stuck swiping through watch faces for minutes at a time. Thankfully, Google is aware of this issue and they’ve included a way to resolve it. So today, I wanted to show you how to hide specific watch faces from your smartwatch.
Hide Android Wear Watch Faces
- Launch the Android Wear companion application on your phone
- Tap the ‘More’ button in the Watch Faces section
- Tap on the 3-dot menu icon for a watch face you want to hide
- Then tap on the ‘Hide on Watch’ option
Explanation
I’m not sure why Google didn’t include a long press action from within the Android Wear device itself. They do have a dynamic Recent section that helps to gather the watch faces you use the most, but it’s not an optimal solution. Instead, we need to launch the Android Wear companion application on the smartphone we have the watch paired to. Once the application is open, look for the Watch Faces section (which should be directly under the featured image).
At the top right of the Watch Faces section, you should see a More button. Tapping on this will take you to a page that lists all of the watch faces you can choose on your smartwatch. Depending on which OEM made your device, you could have a lot of watch faces here. . .or you could have a small amount. You also have the ability to load this up with 3rd-party watch faces that are downloaded from the Play Store too.
Each of the watch faces listed here will have a preview image of what they look like, the name of the watch face, and a 3-dot menu icon at the top right. To hide an Android Wear watch face from your smartwatch, all you have to do is tap the 3-dot menu icon at the top right and then tap the Hide on Watch option. You’ll see the preview image for the watch face gray out (as shown in the image above) and you will no longer see these when you’re switching watch faces on your smartwatch.
If you change your mind in the future, and want to display the watch face on your smartwatch again, you’re able to do so at any time. All you have to do is go through these steps again, except this time you want to tap on the Show on Watch option after you tap on the 3-dot menu icon. You can also change your current watch face to a hidden watch face directly from the Android Wear companion application by selecting the Set on Watch option.
the app no longer looks like this and thus no apparent way to delete pre-installed watch faces….on samsung fear s3 watch anyway. you can uninstall any that you may have installed yourself, however.