Overview
- Reports across Pixel Watch 3 and 4 and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8, Ultra, 7, 6, 5 and 4 describe AOD elements lingering over the active face on third-party designs.
- Coverage points to Wear OS 6’s new opacity-fade AOD transition, which can freeze mid-animation and render both the ambient and active layers simultaneously.
- Stock, preinstalled faces are not affected, indicating a platform-level change that conflicts with many existing third-party watch face frameworks.
- Temporary mitigations include switching to a stock face, reselecting or changing third-party faces, developer tweaks such as setting transition duration to "0" in XML, and downgrading to Wear OS 5.1.
- An open Google Issue Tracker thread dating to October and vendor statements confirm the bug is recognized, with no permanent fix released and some users warning about possible extra power draw and OLED retention risks.