Hands-On With The 4 New watchOS 26 Watch Faces
During the WWDC 2025 keynote, Apple showed off only one new watch face arriving in watchOS 26. Once again, the company was revamping the Photos watch face with the Liquid Glass design. While in previous years Apple decided to offer new watch faces for beta testers, the company opted to wait until the Release Candidate version of watchOS 26 to share its new concoctions.
In total, there are four new watch faces: Waypoint, Flow, Exactograph, and Photos. For Waypoint, Apple says the watch face gives "a sense of direction while you're exploring." It offers Compass, Maps, and suggested locations along the dial. Users can also add three corner complications and a larger one. It's available in different colors, digital and analog time styles, night mode, and more.
José Adorno/BGR
For the Photos watch face, Apple says you can use your favorite images as a watch face, such as syncing an album or specific people, places, pets, and cities from your photo library. Apple intelligently crops the photo to fit the display and integrate the time, even though you can also choose different styles for each image.
Meet the Flow and Exactograph watch faces
Flow is another of Apple's brand new watch faces, and it brings a healthy dose of Liquid Glass to your wrist. This colorful, abstract background swirls in response to movement. Users can pick between several colors, typefaces, and choose to turn the background on or off. This option will look especially good on the Apple Watch Series 10 and Apple Watch Series 11, which have more curved displays.
José Adorno/BGR
Last but not least, Apple also offers a new Exactograph watch face. This watchOS 26 option has a few different designs, with my favorite being the option without a background and Style Open II. This watch face separates hours, minutes, and seconds onto separate dials for precise timekeeping. Users can interact with the watch face to expand the minutes and seconds dials by up to 5 times, which brings even more precision.
These new watch faces will be available alongside watchOS 26, which is making its way to Apple Watch users on September 15. We will let you know if we learn more from the Release Candidate version of this upcoming software update.