How to Change, Add and Customise Watch Faces on Apple Watch
2 min read
Your watch face is the screen you look at most, so it pays to set it up the way you like. Apple Watch lets you keep several faces ready and switch between them in a second — for example a clean face for work, a busy one with fitness data for training and a dim one for the evening.
Switch to another face on the watch
- Touch and hold the current watch face.
- Swipe left or right to the face you want.
- Tap it to use it.
Add a new face
On the watch: touch and hold the face, swipe all the way to the left, tap the + (Add) button, browse the collections with the Digital Crown and tap Add.
On your iPhone: open the Watch app, tap Face Gallery, choose a face, pick its options and tap Add. Faces you add appear under My Faces on the My Watch tab, where you can also reorder or remove them.
Customise colours, style and complications
- Touch and hold the face, then tap Edit.
- Swipe left and right to move between the settings (style, colour, dial, complications).
- Turn the Digital Crown to change the highlighted setting.
- On the complications screen, tap a slot and choose what it shows — weather, activity rings, calendar, battery or data from apps you have installed.
- Press the Digital Crown to save.
Complications are what make a face useful. A good rule: put the two or three things you check most often in the biggest slots, and leave the rest empty for a cleaner look.
Good to know
- Faces come from Apple. Apple Watch runs the faces built into watchOS. Apps and designers can add complications and share face set-ups, but they cannot install a completely custom face design the way Wear OS watches can.
- Photo faces let you use your own pictures as the background — a popular way to personalise the watch.
- Sharing: you can send a face you have set up to a friend as a .watchface file. See our guide to Apple Watch face sharing.
- Available faces depend on your watch model and watchOS version.