You’re not seeing double: a strange Wear OS bug overlays the watch face and the Always-on display

The arrival of Wear OS 6 was welcomed with notable enthusiasm by the community, thanks to the introduction of a completely renewed design language, such as Material 3 Expressive or One UI 8 Watch, and to substantial improvements in the handling of “tiles” and the overall experience.

However, as is often the case with major software updates, the new features bring with them some unforeseen issues.

In recent weeks, in fact, a growing number of users with Samsung Galaxy Watch and Google Pixel Watch have started reporting a troublesome graphical bug that compromises the readability of the display, creating a decidedly unpleasant visual overlapping effect.

Wear OS 6, a “ghosting” issue on third-party watch faces

The malfunction manifests itself specifically during the transition between the active mode and the Always-on Display (AOD). Under normal conditions, when the user stops interacting with the smartwatch, the screen should dim the brightness and show only the essential information; conversely, upon wake, the AOD should disappear completely to make way for the active watch face.

The Wear OS 6 bug abruptly interrupts this transition. The Always-on mode elements do not disappear as expected, but remain etched on the screen, overlapping the main watch face.

The result is a “ghosting” effect that makes it difficult to read the time or consult the complications.

It is important to note that this phenomenon seems to affect exclusively third-party watch faces. The watch faces preinstalled by Google and Samsung remain immune to the problem, suggesting that the bug lies in how the new operating system handles the standard API transition levels for external applications.

Furthermore, the issue does not appear immediately after installing a new watch face, but tends to appear after it has been used for a certain period.

Technical causes in the code

The developer community and more experienced users have not stood still and have begun investigating the causes of the problem. By analyzing the XML code of the affected watch faces, the most credited hypothesis is that this is what in computer science is called a “race condition”.

It is essentially a software defect that occurs when multiple processes attempt to control or modify shared data simultaneously, leading to an unexpected or incorrect result.

Specifically for Wear OS 6, the culprit seems to be a new fade animation introduced for the transitions of the Always-on display.

Ideally, this animation should complete before the watch enters sleep mode or wakes up. However, due to this “race” between processes, the animation sometimes does not complete, leaving the watch stuck in a visual limbo that shows both the active mode and the ambient mode at the same time.

The error has been reported on a wide range of flagship devices, including the Pixel Watch 3 and Pixel Watch 4, as well as the Galaxy Watch 8 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Fortunately, both Google and Samsung have acknowledged the existence of the problem, with open cases on the Google Issue Tracker and on Samsung developer forums.

Temporary workarounds while awaiting a definitive fix

User frustration is palpable, especially because the problem, which emerged initially in October of last year, was not fixed with the Wear OS 6.1 update, released in December. Many hoped that this patch would eliminate the glitch, but reports continue to come in.

While waiting for Mountain View to release a definitive fix, there are some stopgap solutions to mitigate the discomfort.

The simplest solution, albeit restrictive, is to temporarily switch to a system preinstalled watch face, thereby avoiding third-party options that trigger the bug.

Another option is switching watch faces as soon as the problem manifests, since the glitch tends to accumulate over time.

For more technically inclined users familiar with editing XML codes, there is a more complex route: it is possible to set the transition time to zero inside the watch face file.

This modification disables the fade animation that causes the conflict, visually solving the problem at the root, albeit sacrificing the transition aesthetics.