Wear OS 5 makes it easier to set new watch faces on your Pixel Watch

• Wear OS 5 introduces a new way to quickly and easily apply new watch faces to Pixel Watch.

• The Wear OS 5 Play Store gets a new “Always set watch face” switch.

• You can also apply a watch face from the Play Store directly to the Pixel Watch.

Google introduced Wear OS 5, based on Android 14, at I/O 2024. The latest version of Wear OS offers major performance and battery life improvements, as well as an updated watch face format that supports new complications and data types. Other minor improvements include a new grid-style app drawer and improved camera controls. A small change in Wear OS 5 that seems to have slipped under the radar makes setting up a new watch face on the Pixel Watch significantly quicker and easier.

On Pixel Watch with Wear OS 5, when you download a watch face from the Play Store, you’ll be prompted to set it as your new watch face. It also has one Always adjust watch faces switch. When enabled, your Pixel Watch will automatically switch to any new watch face you download from the Play Store. To set only the currently downloaded watch face as your Pixel Watch’s new watch face, leave the switch disabled and confirm your choice by tapping the checkmark.

Google notes that this option will only appear for select watch faces and is limited to Wear OS 5 with Pixel watches.

Don’t worry if the option doesn’t appear after downloading a new watch face on your Google smartwatch. On the watch, navigate to Play Store, scroll down and tap Settings, and activate it Always adjust watch faces switch.

Apply a watch face directly from the Play Store

Alternatively, when you open the Play Store list of an installed watch face on the Pixel Watch, a will appear Sentence Option. Again, this is faster than using the companion Pixel Watch app on your phone to switch to a recently downloaded watch face. Unfortunately that is Sentence The option will not appear in the watch face’s Play Store list on the phone itself.

I regularly download new watch faces for my Google Pixel Watch 2 from the Play Store as I find them. However, most of the time I forget to switch from my existing watch face to the newly installed one. The process itself is also complicated. You can’t apply new watch faces directly from the Play Store; Instead, you’ll need to use the companion Pixel Watch app.

This small change in Wear OS 5 fixes the issue and makes it quicker and easier to try out new watch faces on your Pixel Watch.