Older watch faces may soon show an incompatibility warning on the Play Store (APK teardown)

After Samsung unveiled its Wear OS 5-powered Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra last week, Google confirmed that the new software release won’t support older watch faces. The company said that watch faces not designed with the Watch Face Format will not be compatible with Wear OS 5 devices, and it’s now prepping a warning message for the Play Store that will alert users of the same.

A teardown of Google Play Store version 41.7.16 has surfaced new strings of code pointing to the upcoming warning message. The strings reveal that the Play Store will soon start showing a warning on watch face listings that have not been updated to support the new Watch Face Format complications. The warning will appear within the watch face details section and it will state: “This watchface may not support all complications.”

The warning message is likely for users who update an older smartwatch to Wear OS 5, as a Google support page clarifies that the Play Store won’t even display incompatible watch faces to those with a new Wear OS 5 smartwatch. It will help users updating to Wear OS 5 figure out why some of their pre-installed watch faces don’t work or are not available for installation.

In case you missed it, Google’s new Watch Face Format is an XML-based standard that aims to make designing and maintaining watch faces a whole lot easier. Although Google introduced it over a year ago, the company has just made it mandatory for watch faces targeting Wear OS 5. These changes won’t affect smartwatches running an older version of Wear OS, and users should be able to continue using watch faces not made with the Watch Face Format without any issues.