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Fossil removes dozens of smartwatch faces (Update: Fossil responds)
- A recent Fossil Gen 5 software update inexplicably removed dozens of watch faces.
- If you used one of the removed faces, your watch would start using the default face instead.
- Fossil has since commented on the change, saying the removed dials covered “less than 1% of all consumer engagement with our watch faces.”
Update: September 7, 2021 – 2:30 p.m. ET – Fossil has sent Android Authority its response to our inquiries about the missing Fossil smartwatch faces. Here is the company’s statement:
Fossil has, via a recent update, removed watch faces to optimize performance and free memory on our devices. The dials removed were those that represented, as a total, less than 1% of all consumer engagement with our watch faces.
Original story: September 6, 2021 – 12:53 pm – Recently, Fossil pushed out an update to some of its watches via the usual Play Store system (via 9to5Google). The update appears to include two new watch faces: “Fitness Digital” and “Dashboard Digital.”
As nice as that is, the update also appears to have removed no fewer than 33 watch faces. This appears to primarily affect the Fossil Gen 5 but could also affect other models in that family, such as the Fossil Gen 5E and their LTE variants.
The watch faces we’ve seen removed are here:
- Big Tic
- Blue
- Candice Huffine
- Colorist
- Compass
- Cory Richards
- Darryl Westly
- Defender
- Ettore
- Flip Digital
- Fred
- Grant
- KJ Apa
- Magic 8-Ball
- Mandy Moore
- McKinney
- Mechanical Digital
- Men’s Fashion Digital
- Minimal Dressy
- Minimalist Analog
- Mood
- Movember
- Movember Analog
- Movember Digital
- No Icon Digital
- P-51
- Rainbow
- Robot
- Roulette
- Sail Dial
- Scarlette Shimmer
- Speedometer
- Turn Table
If you were using one of those faces on your Fossil Gen 5, you should see the default face instead. Obviously, if you go hunting for the face you used to use, it won’t be there anymore.
It appears there are only 24 watch faces left after this huge purge. Ouch.
It’s not at all clear why Fossil would cull so many faces. Maybe it has to do with the imminent arrival of Wear OS 3? That seems like a possibility, but we know for certain that Wear OS 3 isn’t coming to the Fossil Gen 5 models. For now, all you can do is find yourself a new watch face if you lost your old favorite.