Watch Faces: wallpapers and custom photo faces for your Apple Watch

What can you do with it?

Pick a ready-made wallpaper

The Gallery tab holds 1,135 wallpapers in 44 themed collections, from Synthwave (66 images), Car (62) and Japan (50) to Planets, Cats, Coral Reef, seasons and food. Everything is inside the app and works with no signal. The search bar filters collections by name, in English or in your own language.

Design your own background

The Designer tab is where the app opens. Under Background you choose Color, Gradient, Photo or Video. A photo fills the watch screen automatically; a video gives you either one still frame or a 3-second moving clip. Under Time you decide whether the clock sits at the Top, in the Center or stays Hidden, and Colors sets the color of that time.

Get it onto the watch

From Export you can save an image with Export to Photos, save a moving clip with Save as Live Photo, or build a file with Share as .watchface File. On the watch the result becomes the background of Apple's Photos face, and the watch draws the real time and any complications on top.

Quick start

1. Open the app. It starts on the Designer tab.
2. Tap your watch size in the row at the top, for example 45mm.
3. Tap Background, then Photo, then Pick Photo from Library and choose a picture.
4. Tap Time and choose Hidden, so the watch shows its own live clock instead of one frozen into the picture.
5. Tap the three-dot menu, then Export, then Export to Photos.
6. On your iPhone, open Apple's Watch app, add or edit the Photos face and choose that picture.

What is free and what Premium adds

Nothing in the gallery or the designer is locked behind a paywall. You get 5 exports per calendar month in total, shared between gallery downloads and every kind of designer export, plus 1 saved design. Want a second saved design? Watch a short ad. Free exports come out at @1x size — 396×484 pixels for 45mm, for example.

Premium, either a subscription or a one-time Lifetime purchase when the App Store offers it, removes the monthly limit and all ads, lets you save as many designs as you want, and adds HD Export at @2x. Lifetime pays off only for someone who plans to keep using the app past a year or so; otherwise the monthly or weekly plan costs less upfront. Restore Purchases lives in Settings.

Privacy, offline use and permissions

There is no account and no server of ours. Your photos, videos and saved designs stay in the app's own storage on your device, and nothing is synced to iCloud. The internet is only used for ads in the free version, Google's consent form and App Store purchases.

• Photos (add only): to save your exports into your library. Picking a photo or video uses Apple's picker, which hands the app only the item you choose.
• Tracking: asked once, only for ads in the free version. If you say no, ads are still shown, just not personalized.

What it cannot do

Watch Faces is not a watch app, and it cannot invent a new kind of Apple Watch face; no app can. There are no analog hands, weather, fitness rings or complications made by the app; everything you build ends up as a background on Apple's own Photos face. There is no manual crop or zoom for photos. Video faces last at most 3 seconds with no sound. The size presets cover SE 40mm and 44mm, 41mm, 45mm, Ultra and Series 10 42mm and 46mm. The one-tap Install on Apple Watch button fails on watchOS 26: that feature relies on an Apple mechanism that stopped working across every app on that watchOS version, so saving to Photos is the dependable route.