Most smartwatches are highly customizable, allowing users to change things like the wristband, installed apps, wallpaper and much more. Perhaps, one of the most interesting customization features of any smartwatch is the option to choose your watchface. Depending on which device we’re talking about you can choose from a digital or analog setup, along with various designs and imagery included. Devices like the Pebble smartwatch allow you to create your own watchface from scrap, but if you’re not savvy enough to do so, you can always download user-created watchfaces from a community web portal.
Whether you’re looking for inspiration to help you create your own designs, or you just want to find something nice to spruce up your smartwatch it helps to have a great selection of watchfaces to choose from. That’s why we scoured the channels to find some of the best available.
The Best Smartwatch Watchfaces You Can Download
Instead of picking out the best watchfaces for any one platform, we decided to find a few for each. Without further ado, here are the best smartwatch watchfaces for the Pebble, Samsung Gear lineup, and Android Wear devices.
The Best Android Wear Smartwatch Watchfaces
We’ll tell you whether or not the watchface looks great on a round display (Moto 360, LG G Watch R) or any display.
Planets Watchface
This watchface is great for astronomers and star-lovers alike. It shows the time, just as it should, but it also displays the current alignment of all planets within our solar system. It uses a very minimal design style which displays the planets in a relative grid. It also has some pretty cool animations, with comets floating around on the very edges of the screen to indicate the seconds passed.
The Planets Watchface looks best on the Moto 360 or LG G Watch R, the two Android Wear watches with round displays. However, it will work just fine with any Android Wear smartwatch. Did we mention it’s free?
Military Digital Watchface
The Military Digital Watchface will cost you $1.25 but it’s well worth the price. Although, we wouldn’t recommend installing it on a square device, only round ones like the Moto 360 and LG G Watch R.
As for how it functions, it displays both the time and date in easily readable layouts. In addition, it keeps track of your daily steps taken, and offers a current readout of both your smartwatch and connected smartphone battery life.
If you want something with a little more information on display, then you can’t go wrong with this one.
Pujie Black
For this watchface, it doesn’t matter what model Android Wear you have they all look equally fantastic. One of the best things about the Pujie Black watchface is that it’s highly customizable. You can change just about everything like the overall layout, colors and theme, data readouts and more. If you’re looking for something you can throw on your device and customize to your liking this is your best bet.
At $1.46, the Pujie Black watchface is more than worth it.
Beautiful Weather Watchface
If you like having the weather displayed right along with an animation then the Beautiful Weather watchface is for you. In addition to the current local weather, it also displays the time, date and battery level. If you don’t like the various preset wallpapers — all of which have to do with weather patterns — then you can set a custom wallpaper from your gallery.
It also happens to be free.
The Best Pebble Smartwatch Watchfaces
The Pebble watchfaces are a little different than some of the other offerings on this list. While the Pebble smartwatches are certainly full-featured, they lack a color display. That’s not to say the custom watchfaces lack style.
Beam Up
Beam Up is an extremely minimal — yet aesthetically pleasing — watchface for Pebble devices. It merely display the time in a twenty-four hour format. A small animation shows the changing numeral beaming out of view, as if some offscreen spacecraft is transporting it away.
As with most Pebble smartwatch watchfaces this one is free to download and install.
0Degrees Temp
This stylish and popular watchface borrows from a previous design that was a hit on the platform — 90Degrees by mereed. The elements displayed onscreen include the current time, date, temperature, battery level, and connection status. The most interesting feature is that at the very top of the face, a weather animation is displayed to signify local weather patterns in your area.
0Degrees Temp is free to download and works with SDK 2.0 devices.
Glance Watchface
The Glance Watchface for Pebble devices offers more than just an aesthetic overhaul it also functions as a notification and quick SMS response app.
Of course, it can be customized to show a whole slew of information too including the current date, time, weather, sports scores, departure times and more. It is one of the most full-featured smartwatch watchfaces for Pebble devices. We dare you to find one that has more support and features. It might be possible, but it’s certainly going to be difficult to do.
Studio Clock Stopwatch
The long-titled Studio Clock Stopwatch, Countdown, Yachtimer, Watch watchface for Pebble is exactly as described. It has several different modes — all of which were listed — that you can switch between with the simple tap of a button. All of the modes look stylish, minimal and downright awesome. When it comes to an e-paper style watch, the watchface designs don’t get much better than this.
The Best Samsung Gear Smartwatch Watchfaces
The original Samsung Gear was running Android, so it’s not included in this list of Gear-compatible watchfaces. However, all of Samsung’s watches running Tizen will work just fine with these. Since Samsung’s proprietary app store is not available on the web, you’ll have to use your device configuration to download and install these directly.
Desk Clock
The Desk Clock watchface is remarkably simple and minimal, yet it’s everything we’ve come to want on a smartwatch. Did we mention that it looks absolutely stunning?
It can be customized to display various colors, the date, and battery level. It’s also free, so there’s that. The seconds are animated around the digital clockface, which is something that doesn’t translate quite well to a still image. Believe us when we say, this watchface looks good especially in custom colors.
Tread 2
We have always thought see-through devices are cool, as do most geeks. Clear cases on our devices allow us a glimpse inside to see the working mechanical parts, circuit boards and more. Of course, a smartwatch is perhaps a bit too small to include something like this. The Tread 2 watchface offers a glimpse inside the device, in a digital manner. The mechanical clock changes and updates with time allowing you to display dates, single minutes and even change the various colors used.
Words
When you want something extremely minimal for your Gear device that only displays the time in the most simple of ways, the Words watchface is your best bet. Just as the name implies, it displays the current time spelled out in words. For instance, twenty-three forty-seven as displayed in the image preview.
It only comes with one style, but there are several languages available for use in case you’re not a native English speaker. The language options available include English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.
WordsClock
Just like the Words watchface above, WordsClock is designed to display full text on the screen which tells you the time. The biggest difference with WordsClock is that its a lot more customizable, and it also includes the date.
The time is displayed in long-form word format over whatever wallpaper you have selected. That means you can display the time over a custom image if you so desire. In addition, the time is always rounded up to the closest five minutes. You’ll never have to worry about being late again with this watchface installed.
The Best Apple Watch Smartwatch Watchfaces
The Apple Watch isn’t supposed to launch until April, so we can’t really include anything here just yet. However, we’ll be back to update this section as soon as the device hits the market and there are plenty of watchfaces available for the device. Judging by the tech demos and preview images Apple has released, it’s going to have a lot of stock options. We still don’t know much about the watchfaces and whether or not they will be able to be custom designed by third parties.