Most of Apple's operating systems got significant updates this week, including the smartwatch watchOS 11. However, the new update surprised Apple Watch fans when they discovered it removed several old watch faces.
Redditors noticed the absent Faces (spotted by our friends at TechRadar). Missing faces include the Chronograph, Explorer, Numerals and the Siri Face.
"I'm super disappointed that they've taken away both the Explorer and the original Chronograph faces," the original poster said. "These were my two favorite, and quite a bit more functional than most of the new faces that have been introduced over the last couple of years."
Other versions of some of those faces include Numerals Mono, Numerals Duo and Chronograph Pro. However, they aren't the same, and users lamented that they were being forced to switch or that the update automatically put a different, unwanted face on their watch.
The latest watchOS update brings a lot of great new health and fitness features. It included a trio of new Watch faces, including an updated Photos face, which utilizes AI to recommend images. The other two are Flux, which is dynamic and takes advantage of the 1Hz display on the Apple Watch Series 10. It's a bit cartoonish. Reflections is an analog-esque Face meant to complement the titanium finish.
Many users on the Apple Watch subreddit recommend that people hit up the feedback page on Apple.com to express their displeasure with the missing faces.
As far as we know, there's no technical reason Apple would remove those Watch faces. The newer faces are more abstract or artistic than the missing ones, which makes us wonder if Apple removed them for aesthetic reasons. However, that's a poor excuse for taking away something that customers clearly enjoyed.
Several users commented that the Chronograph had been their watch face of choice since the first Apple Watch debuted in 2014. It was one of the original faces you could choose from.
Apple isn't the only company that pulled this move this year. With the release of Wear OS 5 in July, owners of Google Pixel watches or Samsung Galaxy watches saw some older faces disappear. Most of this was due to Google doubling down on the Watch Face Format introduced in 2023, which made certain faces incompatible.
And Apple faces aren't having a strong go of it outside of Apple Watch as there is currently a bug where sharing an Apple Watch face in a threaded message to your Messages app on iPhone can cause Messages to crash repeatedly.
For our part, the easiest solution is one suggested by several Redditors. Apple should allow Watch owners to download older faces. For now, lovers of Chronograph, Explorer and Numerals are stuck with the gross Flux face.
Apple officials reached out to Tom's Guide to say that the company is "constantly evolving our Faces collection to ensure our customers have the widest variety of expressions." They specifically said that Numerals, Explorer and Classic Chronograph were replaced with faces that "share a similar design sensibility:" Numerals Mono, Infograph and Chronograph Pro.
It doesn't really explain what about the original Faces needed to be updated or retired, and as Redditors pointed out, the replacement faces aren't quite the same or have different features that don't hit quite the same.
