Tizen Watch Apps After Samsung Closed the Store
Samsung stopped all app and watch face downloads for Tizen watches in 2025. See which Galaxy and Gear watches that covers and what an owner can still do.
There is nowhere official left to download an app or a watch face for a Samsung watch that runs Tizen. Samsung wound down the Tizen side of its Galaxy Store in stages and ended the service on 30 September 2025, which is why the store shows nothing for these watches. A list of Tizen apps to install would be a list of things you cannot get.
That covers the usual names: WhatsApp, HERE WeGo, Spotify, MapMyRun, Pear, SmartThings, Flipboard, Facer, Clock and Calculator cannot be downloaded to a Tizen watch today. The clock functions were part of the watch all along, and whatever is already on your watch can stay there. A Galaxy Watch4 or newer runs a different system, Wear OS, and the shutdown does not touch it.
Which Samsung watches run Tizen
Samsung’s support site draws the line in one sentence: its smart watches released before the Galaxy Watch4 operate on Tizen, Samsung’s own system. The Galaxy Watch4 and the models after it run Wear OS, which Samsung builds with Google.
Samsung’s developer documentation lists the Tizen watches by name:
- Galaxy Watch3
- Galaxy Watch Active2
- Galaxy Watch Active
- Galaxy Watch, the 2018 model with no number
- Gear Sport
- Gear S3
- Gear S2
What still works on a Tizen watch
A watch that does what you need is worth keeping. Telling the time, notifications, step counts, workouts and the apps already installed do not depend on the store.
Apps already on the watch stay. The Seller Portal notice answers this directly: people can go on using the content they bought unless they delete it from the device. Facer, the watch face app, says the same on its Google Play listing: the Galaxy Watch3 and older are supported for people who already have the Facer app on the watch.
What Samsung built in stays too. Its feature page for the Galaxy Watch3 lists calls and texts from the wrist, suggested replies, daily briefings, a music controller, a PowerPoint controller, Bixby and Samsung Pay. Its compatibility guide adds the alarm, world clock, timer and stopwatch, and Samsung Health for exercise and sleep tracking. The one exception on the Watch3 page is the camera controller, which Samsung says needed an additional app download.
The phone app is still available. Galaxy Wearable is on Google Play, free, and Samsung keeps a second listing of it that names the Galaxy Watch, Gear S3, Gear S2 and Gear Sport as the devices it is for. On an iPhone, Samsung’s free Samsung Galaxy Watch (Gear S) app is on the App Store. Its listing names the Gear S2, Gear S3, Gear Sport, Galaxy Watch, Watch Active, Watch Active2 and Watch3.
Newer phones are where the models part ways. Samsung’s compatibility page says the Galaxy Watch, Watch3, Watch Active and Watch Active2 work with Samsung phones on Android 5.0 or later that have at least 1.5 GB of RAM, and lists all four as compatible with the Galaxy S24, S25 and S26 series. Samsung supports the Gear Sport, Gear S2 Classic, Gear S3 Frontier and Gear S3 Classic only up to Android 13, and says they are not compatible with Samsung Galaxy phones on Android 14 or newer. Read that page before buying a new Galaxy phone.
Spotify’s support site still has a page for Tizen watches. It lists the Galaxy Watch up to the Watch3 and Watch Active2 as supported, with play, pause and skip for everyone and offline downloads for Premium subscribers. That helps only if Spotify is already on your watch.
Think before you reset the watch
This is the part to be careful with. Samsung’s reset page says a reset removes all of your personal data and restores the watch to its default settings. On a Tizen watch, default settings means the apps and watch faces you added are gone, and the store that supplied them is closed. After a reset, the built-in features are what is left.
Moving to a new phone carries the same risk. Samsung’s instructions for the Galaxy Watch3 say that connecting it to a new phone resets all data except media files and settings. Samsung offers a backup first, and its backup page says what that holds: system settings, watch face settings, data for the preloaded apps, and a list of the apps installed on the watch. A list is not the apps themselves. With downloads switched off, we would not count on a restore to bring them back.
So if the watch works and you like what is on it, keep it paired to the phone it is on for as long as you can. Do not delete an app to free up space unless you are sure you will never want it again.
What Samsung shut down, and when
Samsung gave developers its reason in a notice on its developer site. Starting with the Galaxy Watch4 it switched its watch system from Tizen to Wear OS, new watch apps are distributed through Google Play, and so it was discontinuing Tizen watch apps and watch faces in the Galaxy Store. The dates come from the notices on Samsung’s Galaxy Store Seller Portal, the last of which set out the closing schedule.
| Date | What stopped |
|---|---|
| 16 December 2023 | Developers could no longer submit new Tizen watch apps, or updates to existing ones |
| 30 September 2024 | Sales and new downloads of paid Tizen watch apps and watch faces |
| 25 June 2025 | New downloads of free Tizen watch content |
| 30 September 2025 | Re-downloading content you had already bought, and the Tizen watch service as a whole |
So having paid for an app years ago does not let you fetch it again, and developers have not been able to send out an update since the end of 2023.
Some of Samsung’s help pages still tell Galaxy Watch3 and Watch Active2 owners to open the Galaxy Store from the Galaxy Wearable app to install apps. Those pages make no mention of the shutdown. Go by the schedule.
Sideloading and app archives
Samsung’s developer site still carries the instructions for installing an app on a Tizen watch from a computer, using Tizen Studio and a certificate tied to that watch. They are written for people testing an app they built themselves. It is a developer’s tool, and no substitute for a store.
Archives of old Tizen app files also turn up in searches. Any such collection is unofficial. None comes from Samsung, we have not checked any of them, and we are not linking to one. A paid app copied from an archive is also not yours to install.
On a Galaxy Watch4 or newer
A new app or a new watch face takes a Galaxy Watch4 or later, because there is no official way to add one to a Tizen watch, and the models on sale today are compared among the best Wear OS watches. On these watches your apps come from Google Play. Google’s help page gives two ways to install one:
- On the watch, open the Play Store from the apps list, search for the app and tap Install.
- On the phone, open the Play Store app, find the watch apps or watch faces category, choose an app and tap Install to send it to the watch.
Google adds that the apps on your phone do not sync to the watch automatically. You install the watch version yourself.
Four of the apps named at the top say in their Google Play listings that they run on Wear OS: WhatsApp, Spotify, SmartThings and Facer. WhatsApp’s listing describes replying to messages and taking calls from the wrist. Spotify’s says Premium subscribers can download music to the watch.
There is one trade-off. Samsung says the Galaxy Watch4 and later rely on Google Play services, which are not supported on iOS, so a Wear OS Galaxy Watch will not pair with an iPhone. The Tizen watches did: Samsung lists the Galaxy Watch, Watch Active and Watch Active2 as compatible with an iPhone 5 or later on iOS 9 and above. For an iPhone owner, that makes a Tizen watch the only kind of Galaxy Watch that works, which is a reason to look after it.
