Facer will be back on Samsung's Galaxy Watch with Wear OS 6

Facer is a watch face platform that provided a plethora of options to Wear OS (Android)-powered smartwatches. It's long been available on Samsung's Galaxy Watch models but became unusable when Google decided to block Facer and other platforms like it with Wear OS 5.

Google unveiled Wear OS 6 at its I/O conference earlier this week. The company has also confirmed that the earlier policy has been rolled back, paving the way for Facer to once again be available on the Galaxy Watch smartwatches.

Google had blocked platforms like Facer because it wanted Wear OS smartwatches to have more battery efficient watch faces. You'll find countless online forum posts from users who experienced poor battery life after installing a watch face from one of these platforms.

Wear OS 6 works around this by introducing a Watch Face Push API that provides a third-party app like Facer to utilize a watch face slot next to the native watch faces on the device. This will be useful for developers as prior to the policy rollback, they had to make each watch face available through the Play Store individually.

Some of the earlier changes have been left in place, though. Watch Face Push API is only compatible with the XML-based Watch Face Format, meaning that the entiretly of Facer's vast watch face library won't be available on day one, but the collection should improve once developers get around to updating their designs.

Wear OS 6 brings many new user interface improvements and replaces the Google Assistant with Gemini. Google has said that the Wear OS 6 update will be released later this year, we should expect to see it arrive on Samsung's Galaxy Watch models around the same time.