How to Switch the Face on Apple Watch
Every Apple Watch comes with a selection of watch faces. These pre-installed faces give you all sorts of options, including styling your Apple Watch to look like a mechanical watch with a minute and second hand, spotlighting Siri and its suggestions, displaying a favorite photo, and giving you tons of useful information. Here’s how to switch Apple Watch faces:
Raise the Apple Watch so that the screen lights up. Hard press your Apple Watch screen. Swipe left and right to see the faces installed on your Apple Watch. Tap the one you want to use. Tap Customize at the bottom of the screen to show options you can personalize on the watch face. Tap an area designated for personalization and choose from the options presented.
Get New Apple Watch Faces From the Watch App
The faces preinstalled on your Apple Watch aren’t your only options. Other watch faces are hidden in the Watch app on your iPhone. You just need to find them and install them on your Apple Watch. Here’s how:
On the iPhone that’s paired to your Apple Watch, open the Watch app. Tap Face Gallery at the bottom of the screen. The Face Gallery contains all the available watch face options sorted into categories such as Activity, Color, Modular, and many more. The faces you see vary depending on which version of the watchOS your Apple Watch uses. Apple introduces new faces with each new release but rarely removes any faces. Swipe up and down and side to side to view the watch faces. When you find a watch face you like, tap it to see its options. Make any desired changes to the color or style of the face and assign complications to the corners if the face you choose supports complications. On the watch face screen, tap Add to install this face onto your Apple Watch.
The new watch face you installed is automatically set to be your default watch face automatically, and it appears on the Apple Watch immediately. It is also added to the My Faces section of the Watch app, which shows all the watch faces you have used in the past.
How to Get the Hermes and Nike Apple Watch Faces
If you’ve heard about the premium Hermes and Nike Apple Watch faces and want to add them to your Apple Watch, you may be wondering why you can’t find them on the watch or in the app. It’s because they’re not there. At least they aren’t there for most watches.
To get the Nike Apple Watch faces, you must buy the Apple Watch Nike model. The Nike watch faces are preinstalled on that model, and there’s no other way to get the faces onto a standard Apple Watch model. The Nike models cost the same as the standard Apple Watch Series 5 models.
The same thing is true for the Hermes Apple Watch face. It’s only available if you buy the premium-priced Apple Watch Hermes edition from Apple. Hermes editions of the Apple Watch come with an Hermes-designed leather watchband but tack nearly an extra $1,000 onto the price of the watch. That’s the price you have to pay if you want the Hermes watch face.
Can You Add Third-Party Apple Watch Faces?
There are no third-party Apple Watch faces other than the Hermes and Nike faces. Apple doesn’t allow third-parties to create or distribute Apple Watch faces.
It’s not hard to imagine this changing in the future, much the same way Apple has introduced new options for customizing the iPhone and iPad over time.
