Apps Apple watch faces all gone (except for one Meridian)

[brgjoe]

Got a new iphone Mini 12. Did the phone to phone transfer. The watch though wouldn't pair correctly.

So I unpaired it and paired it up again. It paired this time, but....every single watch face was gone. I had the analog clock plus weather data as my face -- and it's nowhere to be found. Just one watch face it apparently recognized.

Watch is a series 5 watch with latest OS. Phone has 14.1 (which it came with). What the heck happened? Any way to get them back? Or do I have to download and configure different faces again?

 

[waw74]

unpair and re-pair again,
sometimes things just don't go properly

if you wanted, you could try the face gallery on the phone and see if that will send faces, but I'm not too confident that will work.

 

[brgjoe]

Thanks may try that later. Right now I am glad my watch is finally paired with my phone and working together as they should.

And yeah, I did try the watch face gallery on the phone and it didn't work. Will try again tomorrow to pair/unpair and see what happens.

 

[axantas]

It looks like the normal behaviour on pairing a watch. Swipe the only watchface to the left and press the + to add new ones or do it on the phone. There are no old ones in your case.
...as it was in my case. You will get all valuable data back on the watch, but not the watchfaces. Meridian is the default, that appears on setup.

 

[brgjoe]

Weird. When I first got the watch, I paired it up with my 8+ and afterwards, I had all sorts of clock faces to choose from. Now when I paired it up with my 12 Mini, I was just down to that one. Don't know why the rest of the ones I had by default initially just went away.

 

[MacDevil7334]

Weird. When I first got the watch, I paired it up with my 8+ and afterwards, I had all sorts of clock faces to choose from. Now when I paired it up with my 12 Mini, I was just down to that one. Don't know why the rest of the ones I had by default initially just went away.

Earlier versions of watchOS started you out with multiple faces by default after a fresh setup. At some point, Apple changed that behavior to just start you out with the single Meridian face. I am guessing that Apple decided having multiple faces by default left users with the impression that those were the only faces available. I bought my dad a series 4 a couple of years back and he only uses the Utility face because it was one of the defaults. He also accidentally switches to Modular (another of the defaults) from time to time with an errant swipe and gets very confused when that happens since he never set up the Modular face himself and doesn’t want to bother to learn how to delete it (or set up any other face that might be better optimized for the larger screen on the S4).

By only having the single Meridian face as a default, Apple is keeping it simple for users who don’t care about customization (though, really, why get an Apple Watch at that point?). For anyone else, it immediately pushes you to the Faces Gallery to find more options. That puts the user in direct control of what extra faces are on their watch rather than forcing the user to go through and delete a bunch of defaults first.

 

[waw74]

I'm confused, there are 2 ways to take "watch faces are gone." And this thread seems to have people talking about both ways.

#1 - all customized watch faces you've set up
meaning what you see when you swipe left and right on the watch face, they'll also have the complications that you've customized
these show in the watch app on the phone, by going to the my watch section (bottom left button) and the "my faces" section (at the top of the screen)

#2 - all of the face options you have to pick from.
these are all of the watch faces you can choose from to add to "my faces"
these show up in the "face gallery" in the watch app on the phone, you get to it by selecting the "face gallery" button in the bottom center
you can also access these by long pressing the watch face, swiping left until you get to the "add new face" screen with a big + in the middle.


You've said the face gallery was empty, meaning you have no faces to pick from to add to your customized faces

others are talking about having only one face pre-configured as the default


#1 is no big deal, and how it's supposed to work.
#2 is a serious corruption of the OS