Galaxy vs. Pixel Watch: The battle of the faces

Watch faces on Wear OS are one of the best ways to let your personality shine, and I frequently swap between them based on my mood. But one thing I hadn't considered before someone asked me was which Wear OS brand had the best watch faces.

So I fired up my Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra and Google Pixel Watch 3 to look through every watch face, complication, and color variations available, and compare what style and data they bring to the table.

Then I bullied my colleagues Andrew Myrick and Nick Sutrich into looking through every watch face on their TicWatch Atlas and OnePlus Watch 3, respectively, since I wanted every Wear OS brand (besides the Eurasia-only Xiaomi) represented.

Let's dive in and compare first-party Wear OS watch faces for style, variety, customization, and quantity.

Samsung Galaxy Watch faces

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The sheer diversity of watch faces in the Galaxy Wearable app is impressive. Virtually every non-gimmicky Samsung-made watch face has dozens of colors, several customizations, and more system complications than any other brand, while the downloadable third-party options have more limited variations but give you a wider range of styles.

I highly recommend using the Wearable phone app to look through and edit your watch faces; the on-watch customization options work well enough, but some "premade" variations only show up in the mobile app.

Specific to the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, you'll find some Ultra watch faces that take advantage of the extra space to fit up to eight complications. I typically use this for my Samsung Health data, but there's a wide range of Google- and Samsung-made toggles for popular apps.

More generally, Samsung has more animated or "live" watch faces than other Wear OS brands, like Funny faces, My style, Live Wallpaper, or Friends. They're quite cool (if a bit distracting), with unique smarts like pointing out when you have unread notifications or swapping patterns with a tap.

Once the novelty wears off, I avoid animated watch faces, not only because of battery drain, but also because they rarely leave room for any non-clock data fields. The latter also applies to custom faces like Google Photos or Bitmoji.

Out of Samsung's watch face categories, I'm a fan of the Analog and Informative faces: they squeeze in tons of useful information while making that crowdedness look intentional and stylish. For something more colorful and minimalistic, the Numbers faces are great.

I'm less of a fan of the Classic and Simple faces, because they look a bit too minimalist and don't really fit the look of a Galaxy Watch 7 or Ultra; they'd be better suited to the upcoming Galaxy Watch 8 Classic.

Google Pixel Watch faces

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Google made the smart choice of making every premade watch face customization visible in the main "Add watch faces" menu. So even though it has half as many official watch faces as Samsung, it looks like hundreds because each face has 5–10 premade variations.

Plus, Google lets you look at and customize faces before committing to one, while Samsung makes you add them to your watch before you can see your options.

Logistics aside, half of Google's watch faces follow the Material You aesthetic with bright colors and large clocks that run up against the edge of the rounded Pixel Watch 3 display. The rest either fall into data-heavy fitness or traditional classic/ analog faces that you see on most smartwatches.

My colleague Nick said that Pixel Watch faces "have the best style because they fit so well with the watch's aesthetic, but a lot of them are pretty useless other than to tell the time."

I'm quoting him because I couldn't put it better myself: faces like Digital Bold, Big Time, Abstract, and Vista look striking enough, but some — especially Large Scale and Prime — are a bit too simplistic with their sans-serif fonts and empty space.

Google made "Active" the default face for a reason, I think. Its rounded fonts and bright colors look Google-ish, but it leaves plenty of room for Fitbit complications or Google app shortcuts that people buy Pixel Watches for. I tend to like the busyness of the Field and Adventure faces more than the minimalist look of faces like Index and Utility.

Whichever watch face you end up with, I think Google does the best job of making its AOD-mode faces look like a stylish inverse of the active face, while other brands' AOD mode simply dims the screen or removes elements.

OnePlus Watch faces

Nick looked over each of the 19 OnePlus watch faces, but admitted that after his OnePlus Watch 3 review, he's continued to stick with the default watch face, whereas he didn't care for the main Watch 2 face.

"I feel like all of the best ones on this watch take full advantage of the 1.5-inch screen size and cram a bunch of info onto it," Nick explained, "whereas my favorite Pixel Watch faces are very minimalist because they look good on the shape."

While OnePlus has a decent amount of variety and plenty of complications, none of its alternative watch faces have tempted Nick to switch. It's been a while since I've taken out my OnePlus Watch 2R, but I also don't recall its official watch faces being particularly striking during that review stretch.

OnePlus does have a unique video watch face feature, but like Samsung's animated faces, I doubt people will stick with this battery-draining gimmick. I think a bigger priority for OnePlus is to add more stylish watch faces in general that match with its Classic titanium chic.

Mobvoi TicWatch faces

Andrew, like Nick, isn't that impressed with the watch faces on his TicWatch Atlas. Of the 15 available — including the TimeShow app — he says that he regularly switches between five of them. That's not a bad rotation, but he "doesn't have much of an opinion on the other 10 besides them just taking up space." Ouch!

His favorite, shown in the photo above, is the same sort of data-heavy, fitness-focused face that you'd expect on any fitness watch, focused on cramming in a lot of information. Compared to that, the faces that "try to look like an 'actual' watch just aren't that appealing" to Andrew.

Part of this comes down to preference, of course, but it's also fair to point out that because Mobvoi has fewer first-party watch faces than most Wear OS brands, you're less likely to find many that fit your tastes.

Thankfully, Mobvoi does at least have plenty of Google and TicWatch complications available, if not quite as many as its Wear OS rivals. You also get an ultra-basic watch face on the battery-saving secondary screen that does, at least, come in dozens of color options.

Which is the best Wear OS brand for watch faces?

Objectively, it's hard to argue against Samsung Galaxy Watches here. Whether you prefer classic, analog, minimalist, data-heavy, or gimmicky motion watch faces, Samsung gives you the most options, with different fits to match the standard, Classic, or Ultra models.

Google prioritizes style over ruggedness, and the lack of a bezel makes its faces stand out more prominently than other brands' faces. But your opinion of them will depend on what you think of Google's modern Material You theming. You get very few "classic" faces, and it's hard to differentiate between faces when every single one has a black background.

Either brand gives you plenty of customization options, but I think Samsung lets you choose one to match your personality while Google railroads you a bit to its style.

Ultimately, I'm happy with what both brands bring to the table, but I still think that Google needs to unblock Facer on Wear OS 6 so that it's easier to find third-party options outside of the messy Play Store. And I'm also curious if Google will consider letting us use Gemini to generate pretty watch face backgrounds.