This week, most of Apple's operating system got a major update, including watchOS 11 for the smartwatch However, the new update surprised Apple Watch fans when they discovered that it removed several old watch faces

Redditors noticed the missing faces (discovered by our friends at TechRadar) The deleted faces include a chronograph, an explorer, numbers, and a Siri face

“I am very disappointed that both the Explorer and original Chronograph faces are gone These two were my favorites and were considerably more functional than most of the new faces that have appeared in the last few years”

Other versions of these faces include the numeral mono, numeral duo, and chronograph pro However, they were not the same, and users lamented that they were forced to switch or that updates would automatically put another unwanted face on their watches

The latest watchOS update brought many great new features related to health and fitness, including three new watch faces, including an updated “photo” face that leverages AI to recommend images The other two are Flux, which is dynamic and takes advantage of the Apple Watch Series 10's 1Hz display Slightly more cartoonish, Reflections is an analog-inspired face meant to complement the titanium finish

Many users on the Apple Watch subreddit are encouraged to express their frustration with the missing face on the Applecom feedback page

As far as we know, there is no technical reason for Apple to remove these Watch faces The new faces are more abstract or artistic than the missing faces, leading us to believe that Apple removed them for aesthetic reasons But that is clearly not a good excuse for taking away something that customers enjoyed

Several users have commented that the chronograph has been their watch face since the first Apple Watch debuted in 2014 It was one of the original faces you could pick

Apple was not the only company to make such a move this year; with the release of Wear OS 5 in July, owners of Google Pixel watches and Samsung Galaxy watches saw some old faces disappear Most of this is due to Google's doubling of the Watch Face Format, introduced in 2023, which made certain faces incompatible 17]

In addition, Apple Watch faces are not doing well outside of the Apple Watch Currently, sharing an Apple Watch face in a threaded message to the iPhone's Messages app has a bug that causes the message to crash repeatedly

For our part, the easiest solution is the one suggested by some Redditors Apple should allow Watch owners to download old faces Right now, “Chronograph,” “Explorer,” and “Numeric” lovers are tied to the “Flux” dials

Apple officials contacted Tom's Guide and said the company is “constantly evolving the Faces collection to give our customers the most diverse expression They specifically noted that the Numerals, Explorer, and Classic Chronograph have been replaced by the following Faces, which “share a similar design sensibility Numerals Mono, Infograph, and Chronograph Pro”

Not much explanation was given as to what part of the original face needed to be updated or discontinued, and as Redditors noted, the replaced faces have different features that are not exactly the same or do not hit exactly the same