Critical watch face bug found in One UI 8 Watch

Samsung’s latest version of One UI for Galaxy Watches, One UI 8 Watch (Wear OS 6), brings a ton of visual and functional upgrades. However, it also has plenty of bugs and issues, a fix for which could be coming on 12 January 2025. Well, we are now learning that One UI 8 Watch has another major bug where watch faces aren’t transitioning properly from always-on display (AOD) mode to active mode (via PiunikaWeb).

Users of many Galaxy Watch models, including Galaxy Watch 8, Galaxy Watch 7, Galaxy Watch 6, Galaxy Watch 5, and Galaxy Watch 4, have been complaining that on One UI 8 Watch, when the watch face is transitioning from AOD mode to active mode (when you wake up the watch), it gets stuck halfway. As a result, the active mode shows UI elements from the AOD mode, creating ghosting and visual artefacts.

People are experiencing this issue only with third-party watch faces, and not the stock ones, and some say that it is a system-level bug. Wear OS 6 introduced opacity fade for AOD transitions, a feature that brings up the AOD mode of a watch face or takes it away with a fading animation. Reportedly, if the animation doesn’t end before the screen suspends to save power, the rendering engine gets stuck, displaying both layers simultaneously.

For now, people can try to get around the issue by using stock watch faces. For developers, they can go into the watch face's XML code and set the transition duration to zero (duration="0"). Reportedly, Samsung has acknowledged the issue, but has hinted that it couldn't do anything about the problem as it is a Wear OS 6 issue. We hope that Google and Samsung try to solve it as soon as possible.