I have a watch face with many features that can be edited on my watch but I have to wait 15-20 seconds for the customization options to load on my wear app, and this is an issue with many different devices and watches from across the world.
I’ve tried watch faces from across a few different developers and it seems like each customization option take ~1 second per setting no matter the watch face. For instance my watch face has 13 settings and 5 complications, and on my S25 ultra it takes about 18-20 seconds.
It stinks that I’m getting negative reviews because when it works it works, but the lag is killing me. For reference I personally have a fully updated Galaxy Watch Ultra 2024 (OneUI 8, System Version 16, WearOS 6) and an S25 Ultra with Samsung Wear version 2.2.63.250561
Do I just strip it of most or all its customization or tell people to only customize it on their watch?
So I made a test file where i had 15 different layers where the second style was a blank image, so 15 settings, and when i shared it to my watch via the “run on device” setting the watch face took 7-8 seconds to load on the phones customization screen.
After I merged all the styles it loaded within 1-2 seconds on the phones customization screen, but still not as snappy as the native Samsung faces, even the brand new ones. These ones load instantly, even the more complicated ones.
Nothing fundamentally changed when i merged styles into one setting other than the lack of customization tiles, so this has to be a loading issue within wear software and how customization settings are loaded.
This has bee going on for well over a year. If a watch face has too many (too many is subjective, it can be just a few) complications and/or layers, the Wearable app crashes. Once in a while you can actually see an error (“unable to communicate with watch”). The only work around I’ve found is to set a simple watch face with no complications in it on the watch, and then customize the face I actually want to use. The Wearable app, is snappier, and doesn’t crash with this work around.
It’s odd to me that this has been happening for well over a year (that I know of), and Samsung has not addressed this. Will this be the first ticket to Samsung about this? I highly doubt it. Will submitting a new ticket about help? Probably not.
Well over 3 years in fact, I think this was first mentioned back in 2021/2022.
It’s one of the most common reasons we’re getting 1-star reviews, right after those classic Wear OS installation issues (watch vs phone dilemma, and the process of applying the face after installation).
From what I remember, Samsung did actually address this issue in a reply to one of the reports and claimed this would be “improved” with a software update a few years back.
However, I honestly can’t say if this was in fact improved or not, especially from a user’s perspective. This bug was so random and inconsistent in practice - sometimes affecting the most simple faces, and other times not affecting more complex ones at all.
Sending another report can’t hurt.
In fact it might reach someone who escalates this issue to the WFS/Wear OS team that can actually do something about this. I’m probably gaslighting myself at this point, but it’s worth a shot.
I’ve only had a little over a year of Smart Watch experience, so I couldn’t comment further back than that. I’d be glad to submit with my experiences and work around. It might help them diagnose it.
If you could that would be great. By having no complications you’re meaning user selected ones, right? Because unfortunately there are data sources that Watch Face Studio doesn’t pull from (like real feel temperature) and complications are necessary in some instances.
I wonder if this may be one of the issues, hidden layers and features being included as ghost files on the watch face. I know that if I have layers that are dedicated to a certain customization setting and I hide those layers the setting is still their but all options are transparent. Part of me wonders if this means the hidden files are being included in the watch face but set to 0 transparency in both watch and AOD modes.
If this is true than it would be so annoying because different features in different iterations would have to be gutted and re-added every time you wanted to test something
