Halogen Retro LCD watch face

WILL IT RUN

Halogen needs Wear OS 5 or newer (API 34): Galaxy Watch 4 and later on One UI 6 Watch, Galaxy Watch Ultra, Pixel Watch 1, 2 and 3. On an older watch it never appears in your library.

PUTTING IT ON THE WATCH

1. Buy it here.
2. Open the Play Store ON THE WATCH and install Halogen from your library.
3. Press and hold the face you are wearing, swipe to Halogen, tap it.
4. Press and hold again, tap Customize.

Watch and phone must be signed in to the SAME Google account, or the purchase never reaches the watch. If the phone's page says the app is installed, that is about the phone, not the watch. If the download is not offered right away, restart the watch.

Google Play refunds an app automatically if you ask within two hours of buying. So install it and try it now, not tomorrow.

WHAT IT IS

A liquid-crystal module that fills the whole disc: glass edge to edge, the legend printed on it, numerals drawn as real seven-segment glyphs. Cells that are not driven stay faintly visible, as on a real panel.

KEY FEATURES

1. 13 backlight colours - red, orange and a colourless white among them
2. 4 glass tones and 8 legend inks under them: 416 combinations
3. 6 always-on brightness settings - three levels, cool or warm
4. 4 complications, the top two wide enough for a full weather line
5. 6 places on the dial that open an app when tapped
6. 29 moon drawings, one for each day of the lunar month
7. Heart rate, steps, weekday, date, year, seconds, unread count, battery bar
8. No phone app, no ads, no subscription, no in-app purchase, no data collected

THE ALWAYS-ON SCREEN (AOD)

This is what the face was built around.

The usual always-on drains the colour out of the dial and dims it: the panel keeps glowing faintly edge to edge, and outdoors you cannot read it.

Halogen inverts. The panel switches off and only the lit segments stay - hours, minutes, weekday letter, date, battery. Nothing else is drawn, and nothing is drawn dimly.

Measured on a Galaxy Watch6, 7.3 % of the pixels are lit. The platform allows a watch face 15 %.

That ceiling counts lit pixels, not brightness - so turning the segments up costs nothing against it. Six settings here, not one fixed level: cool or warm, low, medium or high.

No grey copy of the dial, no white background, and no seconds field - it could only look frozen, since the screen redraws once a minute.

CUSTOMIZE

Press and hold the dial, tap Customize, swipe left and right.

- Backlight colour, 13: Amber, Gold, Lime, Mint, Jade, Aqua, Cyan, Ice blue, Violet, Rose, Red, Orange, White
- Display glass, 4: Moss, Sand, Slate, Pearl
- Printed legend, 8 inks
- Always-on brightness, 6
- Backlight, 4: on wrist raise for about 3 seconds, on tap, always on, off
- Hour format, 3: follow the watch, 12-hour, 24-hour

THE FOUR COMPLICATIONS

Two wide slots above two narrower ones: 190 pixels on the top row, 160 on the bottom. The top pair was cut wide enough for a weather provider's place name and temperature on one line.

Each takes text, an icon or a small image - or is left unlit.

They arrive filled: sunrise and sunset, watch battery, next calendar event, date.

To change one: swipe to the slot, tap it, pick a source.

IF A SLOT IS BLANK

Halogen reads no weather of its own and never asks for your location: weather reaches this dial only through a complication you add. If one shows a dash, Wear OS has not given watch faces location access, which it does not do by default:

Settings > Security and privacy > Permission manager > Location > Watch faces > Allow while using the app

Everything else - time, date, steps, heart rate, battery, notifications, moon phase - works the moment you install it.

SIX PLACES TO TAP

HALOGEN opens the phone, BASILBASE your alarms, the heart rate reading the heart rate app, the battery icon battery settings, the unread count messages, and the date your calendar.

If you have a question, or something is not working right, please write to us at [email protected].