Samsung’s latest Galaxy Watch 4 update may prevent your watch face from working properly

A few days ago, Samsung started releasing an update to its latest Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatches, which adds a few new features like better sleep tracking, a few new watch faces, and animal sleep symbols. But according to a Reddit user, the latest Galaxy Watch 4 update may prevent some watch faces from working correctly when the Always-on display feature is turned on (via Android Police).

After updating their Galaxy Watch 4, the Redditor found out that their favorite hand-coded watch face does not update the displayed information while the watch is not in use and the Always-on display option is enabled. When they noticed the problem, they started looking into what might be causing it.

According to the Redditor, a possible cause of the watch face not updating the displayed information may be that, after the update, the Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatches no longer utilize the onTimeTick() method, which is a block of code that when called upon by the smartwatch will update the displayed time while the watch is in ambient mode.

 
The Reddit user explains that older watch faces use “WatchFaceService.Engine” and depend on the onTimeTick() method to update the displayed time when the watch is not in use. The Redditor suspects that this may be an attempt to conserve battery power, or that it may be simply a newly-introduced bug. But does this mean that the Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatches are broken now?

Well, the Reddit user also explained that recent watch faces don’t use WatchFaceService.Engine and therefore shouldn’t be affected by the issue. So, if your Galaxy Watch 4 doesn’t update the time when you don’t use the watch and the Always-on display option is activated, maybe it is time for you to choose a new watch face for your Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatch until Samsung fixes the issue.