Warning: most Wear OS watch displays use OLED technology, where having pixels lit for more than a few minutes at a time can cause screen burn-in and severely degrade the display within a few weeks!!! Do not use this setting unless you keep “Always on screen” disabled or you are sure your watch has LCD screen which is not damaged by constant pixel use!
Please see an explanation of the 3 screen modes of Bubble Cloud in this post: Active vs. inactive vs. ambient screen
The inactive screen always has matching content with the ambient screen. Normally the inactive/ambient screen has a black background and very few colors since OLED screens use battery power proportional to the number of lit pixels. They are also susceptible to screen burn in, if the same pixels are lit for an extended time. This becomes most critical when the “Always on screen” is enabled.
If
- you are not using the always-on-screen (i.e. your watch screen is turned off most of the time)
- or your watch has an LCD screen (Moto 360, Sony SW3), neither screen burn-in nor battery life makes the low-pixel count ambient mode necessary
you might want to make the inactive screen appear more like the interactive screen (color/textured background, filled bubbles etc).
For this you simply need to select option #1: “Filled bubbles” for both the active and the ambient bubbles. The active bubbles are set in the “App launcher” card, the ambient bubbles are set in the watch-face card:
Or on the watch:
Active bubbles = filled:
Ambient bubbles = filled:
After this setting (if 1-click themes are used) the only difference between active and inactive modes will be a missing seconds hand if you use one:
Active:
Ambient:
The same is true, if you set both app-launcher and watch face/ambient to “hollow bubbles”. If the bubbles are set to be the same, the app will not generate a separate ambient face.
Do not pick selective ambient or full-clock ambient however, because that necessitates a different inactive face to be created.
For more information about the watch face mode please see
Update
New expert option “Ambient background always black” – workaround for black screen issue when returning from ambient if ambient is same as active (default=true, but not for existing users)
Warning: There is a reason for not making this setting easier! Most Wear OS watch displays use OLED technology, where having pixels lit for more than a few minutes at a time can cause screen burn-in and severe degradation of display within a few weeks!!!
Do not use this setting unless you keep “Always on screen” disabled or you are sure your watch has LCD screen which is not damaged by constant pixel use!
