Address watch face issues

Creating a custom watch face for Wear OS by Google is substantially different from creating notifications and wearable-specific activities. This page describes some issues you might encounter as you implement your first few watch faces.

Use relative measurements

Wear OS devices from different manufacturers feature screens with a variety of sizes and resolutions. Your watch face can adapt to these variations by using relative measurements instead of absolute pixel values.

When you draw your watch face, obtain the size of the canvas with the Canvas.getWidth() and Canvas.getHeight() methods. Then, set the positions of your graphic elements using values that are some fraction of the detected screen size. If you resize the elements of your watch face in response to a peek card, use values that are some fraction of the space remaining above the card to redraw your watch face.

The Watch face sample app demonstrates the best practices for configuring a watch face.