A bug in Wear OS 6 and 6.1 is breaking how third-party watch faces behave on both Google Pixel Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch models. Normally, a watch face has two states: an Always-On Display (AOD) version that’s dim and simplified, and a full, active face that appears when you raise your wrist or unlock the watch.
The glitch in Wear OS 6 makes parts of the AOD layout not disappear when the watch wakes up. Instead, they linger as semi-transparent elements layered on top of the normal face.
Wear OS 6 glitch is indiscriminate to Samsung and Pixel watches
The Wear OS 6 glitch only affects third-party watch faces and not the ones that come pre-installed. It happens on both Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch, so it’s not a Samsung-only issue.
Notably, it affects the Pixel Watch 4 and Pixel Watch 3, as well as Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 and Ultra lineups. The bug appears after some time, not immediately after installing a face. Switching to another third-party face can temporarily fix it, but it will come back.
Both Google and Samsung have acknowledged the problem, and there’s already an open issue on Google’s tracker dating back to October. The underlying cause seems to be a system-level change in the software.
It's an annoying issue. Ambient mode exists for a reason. It’s meant to show a simplified, low-power version of the watch face with carefully limited elements, reduced refresh, and strict pixel rules to preserve battery life and prevent OLED burn-in.
Active mode, on the other hand, is supposed to be fully readable, responsive, and information-dense. These features shouldn't be overlapping.
It also raises a battery and hardware concern. There may be unnecessary overdraw that will cause higher power consumption, and increased risk of screen retention on OLED panels that will cause permanent burn-ins.
Many solutions but no permanent fixes yet
From Google's IssueTracker thread, there are few temporary workarounds users have mentioned. Among them is manually forcing opacity resets, which is a developer fix. For example, you'll force opacity back to 100 using a time-based trigger like {YEAR > 0 ? 100 : 100}).
This trick basically exploits how the rendering engine reacts to state changes. By referencing YEAR, the watch face engine treats opacity as something that could change over time, because YEAR is a time-based variable that updates. Every time the system evaluates time-related expressions, it’s forced to re-evaluate that property.
It sometimes pushes Wear OS to redraw the face correctly and clears lingering AOD elements. It only works for some cases, and does not fix the issue where ambient-only elements bleed into active mode.
Switching from one third-party watch face to another can temporarily clear the ghosted AOD elements. The problem usually returns after some time, especially once the watch has entered and exited AOD multiple times.
Downgrading the software is an effective solution as the same watch face works perfectly on Wear OS 5.1 or Pixel Watch 2. Until Google releases a patch or another update, you'll just have to stick with preinstalled watch faces to be on the safe side.
