Where to Discover Amazing Custom Watch Faces for Galaxy Watch 8 and Pixel Watch 4

Wear OS 6 has brought back personalized watch faces to Android timepieces, with applications like Facer, WatchMaker, TIMEFLIK, and Pujie offering the Galaxy Watch 8 and Pixel Watch 4 an extensive array of designs. Other Wear OS devices will have to wait for this update, and exploring numerous custom watch faces only emphasized how thrilling this distinctive feature is.

Following the limitation of older, power-hungry watch faces in Wear OS 5 with Watch Face Format (WFF), Google collaborated with Facer and other applications to create a solution: the Watch Face Push API.

In Wear OS 6, each watch face application is allocated one “slot” in your watch’s favorites menu, which can be accessed by tapping and holding the screen. Select a watch face within the mobile application, and it will push to that designated slot. Your watch’s storage remains organized as your newest selection replaces the previous one.

You can utilize as many compatible watch face applications with Wear OS 6 as you like, but since many require a subscription for premium faces, you might prefer to stick with a single option. Thus, I explored the choices in Facer, TIMEFLIK, WatchMaker, and Pujie to identify which ones caught my eye.

Facer Premium: $40/year or $5/month

Facer boasts a plethora of unofficial designs for well-known brands like Pokémon, Totoro, Zelda, and Star Wars. Additionally, Facer features official brand collaborations with SpongeBob, Garfield, Barbie, Star Trek, and Tetris, along with “Watchmaker” faces that emulate luxury timepieces. You’ll discover plenty of high-quality designs alongside some more amateurish ones.

The standout feature of Facer is its “power impact” rating for each face, alerting you if it may influence your watch’s battery performance. You can also tap a Sun/Moon icon to toggle between the active display and AOD layout, allowing you to verify beforehand if the latter is too demanding on power.

Facer offers a considerable assortment of Wear OS 6-compatible designs, with over 100 available for free if you want to explore the app without subscribing to Premium; considering Samsung and Google provide about 60 and 30 official faces, respectively, that’s significant—even if the best selections come with a cost.

Additionally, there’s the Facer Creator tool that allows you to craft your own custom designs; it’s designed for releasing faces for others to download or purchase, but you can simply save your creations to your account’s “My Designs” folder and upload them to your watch.

WatchMaker VIP: $20/year or $5/month

WatchMaker features hundreds of thousands of WFF designs, although only 30 are free at any given moment. These seem to rotate daily, allowing you to sample various options, though saving them isn’t possible. Generally, you will likely want to invest in the annual subscription for using this app.

Similar to Facer, there’s a vast assortment of casual user-generated designs, and you can create your own using the “New Watch” button in the main menu—though this requires a separate, one-time “Premium” fee of $12 to add personal images and access other design features.

What draws users to WatchMaker is its extensive library of curated collections that highlight a “classic” or “elegant” style, ideal for my Galaxy Watch 8 Classic. The Knight Watch collection, in particular, is quite stunning, showcasing years’ worth of eye-catching designs that will keep your watch looking fresh and distinctive.

The app interface isn’t my favorite. The primary menu is cluttered with links to other applications rather than offering useful information, and the confusing division between Premium and VIP feels like a tactic to pressure me into double-paying for features. Yet, with over 130,000 WFF faces available, these drawbacks might be easy to overlook.

TIMEFLIK

Flik Pass Pro: $60/year or $5/month

If your main interest is in discovering free watch faces, TIMEFLIK is your best bet. You can find hundreds (if not more) of free WFF-compatible designs by toggling in the main Home view or the “Top Free” view located in the Popular tab.

Where almost every face incurs a fee in Facer and WatchMaker by design, TIMEFLIK typically offers a few free faces for every popular culture or gaming icon you can think of, alongside personal drawings, photographs, and AI-generated content.

The trade-off with TIMEFLIK is that you must watch an advertisement for every watch face you send to your device unless you subscribe for $2.49/month. Since only one watch face can be saved at a time, this means an ad must be watched each time you switch, even if it’s a face you’ve previously used.

Aside from a few designs that mimic high-end watch aesthetics, the majority of TIMEFLIK’s paid and suggested faces tend to be on the amateur side.

How Meta Quest Games Unveil the Future of Gaming on Smart Glasses

Mixed reality games are more sophisticated than ever, and these new releases attest to that.

In his weekly piece, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich explores all aspects of VR, encompassing new hardware, fresh games, forthcoming technologies, and much more.

I’ve been captivated by the concept of mixed reality gaming since the Meta Quest 3 launched nearly two years ago. I can’t believe this device is already two years old, but it has taken this duration for me to gather a considerable number of genuinely compelling mixed reality games that are setting the stage for gaming on smart glasses.

As we anticipate the debut of the first significant commercial smart glasses with a display this month, the latest rumors suggest that the Meta Quest 4 is likely to resemble a pair of tethered smart glasses more than a VR headset. This is fantastic news for mixed reality games, which will become even more enjoyable with lighter, more streamlined headgear.

Developers for Meta Quest are crafting mixed reality applications tailored to gamers now and in the future. Once smart glasses possess the displays and capabilities necessary for gaming, they will support many of the same types of games we currently enjoy on Meta Quest 3, all without the heft of a VR headset.

Banners & Bastions

Banners & Bastions is a new compact roguelike real-time strategy game from the creators of Airspace Defender. Like that title, everything occurs in a “half snow globe” style, conveniently situated on your lap. You can position this half-globe anywhere you desire, making it equally suitable as a tabletop board game and a compact game for laps that you can play on an airplane.

The gameplay shares similarities with Steam hit Bad North, while incorporating various contemporary roguelike trends. Each level starts with a preview of the number and type of enemies that will appear, along with the estimated movement direction of each spawn point (helpful for setting up walls).

Players select units from a random assortment of cards displayed on the screen, aligning with the roguelike aspect of the game. You have a limited budget to spend on units, making it unusual to buy more than 1-2 cards each turn. Units can be deployed anywhere on the map and moved at any moment, so while it’s essential to strategize ahead, you can always adjust placements during battle.

Levels progress in a linear manner and receive the standard 3-star mobile scoring system. Stars may be used to unlock a substantial skill tree, and you’ll gain new cards and units as you advance. Additionally, emergency abilities like summoning meteors or calling for reserve soldiers can aid in keeping your units intact between rounds.

The primary attraction of playing this in mixed reality is the level of control you possess over the action. The game relies solely on hand tracking, making it far more convenient to engage with compared to most VR games, since you only need to wear the headset and start the game. Hand tracking has become exceptional lately. Even my son, who previously disliked hand tracking due to its past unreliability, found Banners & Bastions’ hand tracking to be remarkably effective.

Creating a mixed reality game that depends on hand movements instead of controllers guarantees that, in a few years, smart glasses equipped with displays and capable hardware can effortlessly run this kind of game on the go. It’s a significant improvement over squinting and trying to tap the right unit on a phone screen. I also greatly appreciate the game’s quick levels, which usually take just a few minutes to finish, making it an ideal choice for portable gaming.

Mythic Realms

Mythic Realms is among the most developed mixed reality games I’ve experienced thus far. While it begins as a seemingly straightforward mixed reality game where you fight monsters in your own physical space, you quickly discover that this title is more than merely a combat simulator.

Instead, it’s a comprehensive roguelike RPG akin to The Elder Scrolls: Blades. In fact, the gameplay loop is strikingly similar to that title, including the idea of embarking on quests to collect resources and funds to restore your hometown. From blacksmiths ready to enhance your gear to daily random events that will keep you returning to see what’s happening, there’s never a shortage of entertaining activities.

I genuinely gasped when I grasped the game’s depth, as many comparable mixed reality titles with fantasy combat and randomized room layouts tend to focus solely on combat with little else.

The town itself exists in full virtual reality, so while that segment would need modification to function correctly on mixed reality glasses, I can envision the company adjusting the town concept to a diorama scale that feels more manageable in mixed reality. I really enjoy experiencing the town in VR, though, so it currently feels excellent in its configuration for Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets.

The way Mythic Realms transforms your plays