How to Add a Watch Face to Your Apple Watch
To add a face on the watch: press and hold the current face, swipe left to the end of your collection, tap the + button, scroll the Face Gallery with the Digital Crown and tap Add. To add one from your phone: open the Watch app, tap the Face Gallery tab, pick a design, set its colour and complications, then tap Add. Either way the new face lands in your collection and becomes the one you are wearing — nothing is replaced.
Watch Lux is our app, so here is the honest framing up front: everything in Apple's Face Gallery is free and built into watchOS, and for a lot of people that is genuinely enough. A gallery app only becomes useful once you want artwork Apple does not make — and it installs that artwork as a photo-style face, not as a native one.
The five places a new face can come from
Almost every "how do I get more watch faces" question resolves into one of five routes. They are not equivalent, and knowing which one you are on tells you what the resulting face will and will not be able to do.
| Where it comes from | What you need | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Face Gallery on the watch | Nothing — the watch alone | Apple's stock faces, added and customised on your wrist. |
| Face Gallery in the iPhone Watch app | iPhone paired and nearby | The same stock faces, with a bigger screen for picking complications. |
| The Photos app | A photo on your iPhone | A photo face built from your own image. |
| A shared face link | A link or message from someone | Their exact face setup, if your watch supports every part of it. |
| A watch face gallery app | The app on your iPhone | Designed artwork, installed as a photo-style face. |
Add a face on the watch itself
This is the fastest route and it needs no iPhone. Press and hold the face you are wearing until the face switcher appears. Swipe left repeatedly until you reach the end of your collection, where a + tile sits. Tap it, then turn the Digital Crown to scroll the Face Gallery — faces are grouped by family, with a short description under each. When you find one you want, tap Add. It installs immediately and becomes your active face.
Two things trip people up here. The first is that plain swiping on the face no longer moves between faces — since watchOS 10 that gesture is bound to widgets, so you must press and hold first. The second is that some Gallery entries offer a style choice before you add them; scroll down inside the entry rather than assuming what you see is all there is. Apple's own change the watch face documentation is the canonical reference if a step looks different on your watchOS version.
Once the face is on your wrist, customising it is a separate press-and-hold away: hold, tap Edit, and swipe between the editing screens for colour, dial detail and complication slots. If the face you just added has empty subdials, the complications guide covers what fits where and how each slot behaves.
Add a face from the iPhone Watch app
Open the Watch app on your iPhone and tap the Face Gallery tab at the bottom. Browse by category, tap a design to open it, then set its colour, style and complications on the detail screen before you commit. Tap Add and the face syncs across to your watch, usually within a few seconds. It appears at the end of your collection and becomes active.
The Watch app route is worth the extra step when a face has a lot to configure. Picking six complications on a 41mm screen is fiddly; picking them on an iPhone is not. The Watch app also shows your existing collection under My Faces, where a long press lets you drag faces into the order you actually want them in — useful once you have more than three or four. The face-changing guide covers that reordering and removal flow in full.
If a face you added on the phone does not turn up on the watch, it is nearly always a sync problem rather than a failed add — the two devices need to be in range of each other and the watch needs enough battery to accept the transfer. The syncing checklist covers the order to test things in.
Why your Gallery may look different to someone else's
The Face Gallery is filtered to your specific watch. Faces that require hardware your model does not have never appear in the list at all, and Apple retires faces from older watches as those models drop out of support. So two people running the same watchOS on different watches will see genuinely different galleries — this is expected behaviour, not a bug, and there is no setting that reveals the missing entries.
The one legitimate way to gain faces is a watchOS update, which is where new Apple designs arrive. Everything else — the pages promising unlockable hidden faces, the apps claiming to enable Ultra faces on a Series watch — is claiming something watchOS does not permit. What to check before installing a watch face app covers the claims worth reading twice.
Adding a face someone shared with you
Apple lets you share a face you have set up: press and hold it, tap the share button and send it by Messages or Mail. On the receiving end, tapping the link opens it on the iPhone and offers to add it to the paired watch, complications and all. If the sender used a face your watch does not support, or a complication from an app you do not have, you will be told which parts cannot come across rather than getting a broken face.
It is the most underused route to a new face, because it carries the setup rather than just the design — you get their complication layout too, which is often the hard part. The sharing guide covers what travels, what gets dropped, and why a link sometimes will not open on a Mac or iPad.
When you have run out of Gallery faces
If you have worked through the Gallery and still want something different, the only remaining lever is artwork. That is what Watch Lux is: a gallery of 500+ AI-crafted designs — live and animated, 3D depth and photo styles — installed in one tap through Apple's photo-face pipeline, with a new themed collection landing every week. It is free to download; Pro unlocks the full catalog, with pricing shown in the App Store. It runs on iPhone iOS 16.2+ with Apple Watch watchOS 10+, plus Mac (M1 and later) and Vision Pro.
The caveat matters more than the pitch. Because these install as photo-style faces, they behave like photo faces: the design is an image, so it will not grow analogue hands or invent complication slots that Apple's photo face does not offer. If what you actually want is a ticking dial with six data slots, a stock face is the better answer and this page will keep saying so. Where a gallery genuinely wins is look — the minimal designs for something quieter than Apple ships, the live and animated designs for motion, and dark OLED designs for faces that all but disappear into the panel at night. This week's drop and the full gallery are browsable before you install anything.
For a like-for-like read on where the stock set beats a gallery app and where it does not, the best-faces roundup goes category by category — and the install guide is the step-by-step for the photo-face route itself.
Where do new Apple Watch faces come from?
New faces come from exactly two places: Apple's built-in Face Gallery, which ships with watchOS and grows with each update, and your own images — a photo, or artwork from a gallery app, installed through Apple's photo-face pipeline. There is no Apple store for watch faces, no download button on a web page, and no way to install a face file the way you install an app. Everything else is a variation on those two routes.
That is worth internalising before you go hunting, because it explains why searches for a face "download" so often dead-end. Apple has never opened watch faces to third-party developers as installable software. What developers can do is supply the image, which is why what Apple actually allows is the first thing to read if you are trying to work out whether a listing is being straight with you.
Why are some watch faces missing from your Face Gallery?
Because the Gallery is filtered to your hardware and your watchOS version. Faces that depend on a sensor, a chip generation or a case size your watch does not have simply never appear — they are not hidden behind a setting you can flip. Ultra-only designs are the clearest example, and older Series watches lose access to newer faces as Apple stops supporting them. Updating watchOS is the only thing that legitimately adds faces to the list.
So if a friend has a face you cannot find, compare watches before you go looking for a fix — nine times out of ten that is the whole answer. How faces behave across models covers which differences are real, and the Ultra guide covers the two designs that genuinely are exclusive.
Why can you not download an Apple Watch face from a website?
Because watchOS has no mechanism to install one. A watch face is not a file your watch knows how to open — the Gallery faces are built into the operating system, and everything else is an image passed through the Photos pipeline. A web page offering an Apple Watch face download is either handing you an image to use as a photo face, or sending you to an app. Neither is a native face, however it is labelled.
The practical consequence is that "download" and "install" mean something narrower here than they do on iPhone. An image you save from the web can absolutely become a face — that is the same route a photo face takes — but it will behave like a photo, not like Chronograph Pro. The wallpaper explainer covers what changes when your face is an image.
Does adding a face replace the one you are already using?
No. Adding a face appends it to your collection and switches you to it; the face you were on stays exactly where it was, with its complications and colours untouched. Nothing is overwritten, and you can press and hold to swipe straight back. This is the main reason it is safe to add faces liberally — the only cost of a face you end up disliking is the few seconds it takes to remove it again.
Removing is equally non-destructive: deleting a face from your collection never deletes the design, which stays in the Gallery to be re-added later. The face-changing guide covers removing and reordering, and how many faces you can keep covers what a long collection costs you in practice.
What is the difference between adding a face and customising one?
Adding puts a new design into your collection. Customising changes an instance of a design you already have — its colour, its dial style, its complications. Crucially, the same design can be added more than once and customised differently each time, so one Gallery entry can become a work face, a workout face and a night face. Most people who think they need more faces actually need a second copy of one they already have.
That trick is underused and costs nothing. Add Infograph twice, put your calendar and mail on one copy and your workout data on the other, and you have two genuinely different watches to swipe between. The complications guide covers what fits in each slot, and linking a face to a Focus covers making the switch happen on its own.
When the Gallery runs out of ideas
Apple's built-in faces are free and worth exhausting first. When you want a look they do not make, we have hundreds — free to browse, one tap to install, a new collection every week.
Browse 500+ Faces FreeFree to download · No account required · iPhone iOS 16.2+ and Apple Watch watchOS 10+