Adding a watch face without a phone

Which question are you asking?

“How do I add a watch face without a phone” is really three questions, and they have three different answers. It is worth working out which one is yours before following any instructions, because the advice for one is useless for the others.

• “Can I do it from the watch itself, without touching my phone?” Mostly yes — see below.
• “Does my phone have to stay near me afterwards?” No. Once a face is on the watch, it is on the watch.
• “I don’t have an Android phone at all — can I still do this?” Not for a Galaxy Watch, and not for a reason any app can work around.

What the watch can do alone

A modern Galaxy Watch is a full Wear OS computer, and a fair amount of watch face work happens on it with no phone involved at all.

Switching between faces you already have. Press and hold the current dial until the gallery appears, swipe to the one you want and tap it. This includes Samsung’s built-in dials and anything you have installed since. No phone.

Customising the active face. Long-press the dial and tap Customize to change colours and swap complications — the small live widgets showing steps, battery, heart rate, weather, calendar or calories. Most faces have more configurability than their preview suggests, and this is where it lives. The same editor exists on the phone in Galaxy Wearable, with a bigger screen, but the watch version is complete on its own.

Installing a standalone face from the watch’s Play Store. Open the Play Store on the watch and you can search, buy and install watch faces that are published as standalone Wear OS apps. They download over Wi-Fi, or over LTE on a cellular model, and install without the phone being awake. This is the genuine answer to “add a watch face without a phone”, and it is worth knowing about even if you also use a phone-side catalogue.

Removing faces. Also from the gallery: long-press the face you no longer want and remove it. Worth doing occasionally, since watch storage is finite and a full watch is one of the causes of a failed install.

What still needs the phone

The part that does not work from the watch is pulling a face out of a phone-side catalogue — which is what Galaxy Watch Faces is, and what most of the large watch face libraries are.

The reason is the mechanism. Faces from this catalogue install using Watch Face Push, an interface Google added in Wear OS 6 that lets a phone app hand a complete watch face to a paired watch over Bluetooth. The direction is built into it: the phone holds the catalogue, chooses the face and sends it; the watch receives and installs it. There is no watch-side equivalent that reaches back into a phone app’s library, so this is not a feature we have left out.

There is a plain trade-off here rather than a winner. A standalone watch face app from the watch’s Play Store needs no phone but is usually one face, or a small set, installed and stored on the watch. A phone-side catalogue can offer a hundred-plus designs with full-size previews on a screen big enough to judge them, and sends only the one you chose to the watch. Browsing a hundred previews on a 45 mm screen is not an experience anyone enjoys; that is why the catalogue lives where it does.

Pairing itself also needs the phone, and that one is Samsung’s rule rather than ours. A Galaxy Watch must be set up through the Galaxy Wearable app on an Android phone before it can be used at all, LTE models included.

After it is installed, the phone stops mattering

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the reason the phone requirement matters less than it sounds.

A watch face installed on the watch is a package stored on the watch. It renders on the watch’s own processor, using the watch’s own sensors. Turn the phone off, leave it at home, go for a run — the face carries on exactly as before. Steps, heart rate, battery level, activity rings, the date, alarms and timers are all things the watch measures itself, so complications showing them keep working too.

The handful of things that do stop are the ones that need the internet, not the ones that need the phone: weather that has not refreshed recently, unread-notification counts, and calendar entries that changed after you walked away. On a Wi-Fi or LTE watch, even most of those keep updating without the phone.

So the practical shape of it is: one minute with the phone to install a face, and then no phone. Not “the phone must be present for the face to work”, which is what the question usually assumes.

If you have no Android phone at all

Two versions of this, and both deserve a straight answer.

An iPhone. A Galaxy Watch cannot be paired to an iPhone at all — Samsung dropped iOS support with the move to Wear OS in 2021, and there is no Galaxy Wearable app on the App Store to pair with. This is not something an app can fix, and it is why Galaxy Watch Faces is Android only with no iPhone version planned. If you have an iPhone and a Galaxy Watch, the watch cannot be set up.

No phone whatsoever. The same answer, for the same reason: the initial pairing requires Galaxy Wearable on an Android phone. An LTE Galaxy Watch is genuinely independent afterwards — calls, messages, music, maps and the Play Store all work over its own connection — but it still has to be paired to a phone once to get there. A borrowed Android phone is enough to complete setup, and after that the watch is yours to use on its own.

If your watch is paired to an Android phone and you simply prefer not to use it, the install walkthrough is about a minute of phone time per face, and the catalogue is browsable here on the web beforehand so you already know which one you want.

Questions