every Garmin forerunner 970 Watch Face
every Garmin forerunner 970 Watch FaceMore: Detailed Garmin Forerunner 970 Review
Garmin has taken inspiration from its other watch faces in the Forerunner series to give you a pretty good number of faces for the Forerunner 970. Here are all 16 AMOLED faces as of 2 jun 2025.
Options
There is scope to change various colours to suit your taste, with a neat option for the accent colour to follow whatever you have chosen as the primary data colour.
Much of the true scope for customisation lies in the Data Complications that Garmin offers. It’s a good list that encompasses a range of personal, environmental and other kinds of data, like these: training readiness, VO2max, weather, weekly running distance, acute load, alarm, altitude, barometric trend, battery, body battery, calories, day/date, date/month, floors climbed, HRV status, heart rate, intensity minutes, notifications, recovery time, steps, stress, sunset/sunrise, timer, and there is even a ‘none’ complication which can sometimes help the appearance a little.
Opinions
You’ve come here for an opinion. Here goes. Grab a coffee if you work for Garmin, you’ll need it.
Extremely poor designs: all we can meaningfully change are the complications and basic colour.
This is a truly awful set of watch faces, made worse when you consider you are buying a top-end sports watch. The variety and inspiration on offer here are minimal. Whilst the colour palettes offer some scope for genuine customisation, how and where those colours and accents can be applied is limited to a great extent. Many of the designs are merely subtly different flavours of others – for example, DASH and FR570 are effectively the same.
The selection of faces on Instinct 3 felt better – for those who don’t know, that’s a more affordable watch.
Surely even those readers who like one or two of these Forerunner faces – some of you will, we’re all different – are disappointed by the collection?
Note to Garmin: At least for now, you’ve won the battle for having a sports watch on our wrists during sports. You are fighting for space on our wrists 24/7 against smart watches like the Apple Watch. To achieve that, the watch needs to look good all the time; in the case of FR970, it should have a sporty twist and work efficiently. You are failing to keep up in technical areas such as 4G LTE/5G connectivity (even though we know you will release an LTE version of Fenix 8 Pro later this year), fair enough, there are things beyond your control there. However, you have entirely failed to convince me to wear these watch faces. Whoop looks better, Suunto RUN looks better, Apple Watch looks better.
Your designers appear to be taking you for a ride. You let them work from home, but in reality, they are out training and leaving the design work to their 14-year-old kids. Maybe I’m getting old and grumpy, but these watch faces seem like they might appeal to a younger audience… You know, the ones who generally can’t afford $600 watches.
Oh, and I’m not even going to start moaning about the stupid, stupid yellow bit on the side of the watch. FFS if I wanted a yellow watch, I’d buy one. I bought this watch as it was the blackest one you sold. Hint: I want the bit on the side to match. Does it match any of the yellow clothes I’ve? Of course not, I haven’t got any. Sorry. I moaned.
I’ll get off the fence now.
Jeez. Get a grip. Get a decent design team. Put the current team on testing duty, because you haven’t done that properly either (again)…see below.
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Very helpful. Do you have access to both Instinct 3 and 2?
no but try this: https://the5krunner.com/2025/02/02/every-garmin-instinct-3-watch-face-amoled-and-solar/
The AMOLED watch faces are not too innovative and many are the same ones I have on my Epix Pro. So I guess you have to pay for a couple of nice watch faces, even though they are getting more and more expensive (starting at 2,49 but up to 5,99 (Garmin is really milking their customers) or even 7,99…yikes) and many of them don’t even offer a trial version IOT check it out on your watch. And on top of all that, in some cases, you can use a pro code only for one watch. In case you have two Garmin watches, you would need to purchase the same watch face twice. I don’t mind paying the developer money and I always did in the past when I really liked a watch face and wanted the pro code, but I think this is getting really expensive if you want to try something new.
yes i have thought the same
Any face I have tried, I was able to request a refund and delete when I did not like them.
Lots of existing Instinct 2/2X watchfaces are missing in Instinct 3 MIP. Honestly I know I3 is an incremental upgrade, but cannot understand why they removed them.
Just a stupid question as I’ve never seen a MIP instinct in real life: do any of the default watch faces come with progress bars? It looks like even the utility window does not have a progress indicator, whereas the AMOLED instinct does have multiple watchfaces with progress indicators…
solar mip are here: https://the5krunner.com/2025/02/02/every-garmin-instinct-3-watch-face-amoled-and-solar/
These all have a 1980s Video Toaster graphics retro vibe. I guess it’s an aesthetic but it’s pretty polarizing.
My general impression is Garmin is not paying for top designers who probably do not live in Kansas.
I also suspect management is engineering-y and is somewhat blind to the difference. Garmin analog faces sometimes have stacking errors where the hands are not correctly z-ordered for the analog design they are relocating from physical. That kind of lack of attention is symptomatic of not having the right kind of designers.
970 is ugly like 965. Shame on Garmin!
I like the watch…just not the faces.
Yes, exactly what I meant. – However, I don’t find the 970 particularly pretty. It also looks very similar to the 965. So when I took it out of the box and looked at it on my arm, I thought to myself that it “looks the same”.
yeah it looks very much the same, i think it’s a mostly harmless sporty design which garmin still managed to mess up with rubbish faces and the super ugly yellow bit on the side. UI is improving but only ever so slowly.
All of them look awful. Maybe this was Garmin’s initial idea of discouraging watch face creators to copy their wfs….before someone in management thought that not permitting copies of Garmin wf in the IQ store at all would be easier…. and then it was too late to make the 979/570 wf any better.
But since it’s Garmin we are talking about, they thought that people would be more inclined to buy one or two additional wf if the wf they provide are absolut shite!
not sure why the watchface creators were copying them in the first place! I guess it proves that there IS a market for them. however that market has bought chepaer watches…there could be a clue there at the target market!
I’d agree with the previous comments, that lot of watchfaces are very underwhelming, I can’t imagine too many people are paying for the privilege to use those on other Garmin watches.
The crappier a stock watch face, the more likely someone buys a watch face from the store, the more profit Garmin can make. I’m 99% sure, this was a strategic decision by the Management.
The G in Garmin stands for Greed.
except one or two the rest looks outdated and old style
‘FR970’ and ‘Racing stripe’ are nearly identical, biggest difference: the letters in the naming
Is there a way to export the watch face I have on the FR965 and import into my new FR970? The faces on the 970 are truly awful.
i dont think so.
there was with earlier CIQ versions where you could simply copy a file but that seems to have changed
the ciq store will probably have some that are WAY nicer
if you have a really old watch face it could perhaps be copied but then the screen resolutions wouldn’t match
I have a 955 with a lovely analogue watch face- it’s easy to read and the data fields are clear. I just got a 970 and o am shocked that the watch faces are so poor that I not only care, but I am probably going to return the watch. There are no simple analogue options. There are some nice looking options I could buy, BUT the data field options are limited. For ex there are NO options, even ones sold by Garmin, that show the remaining recovery time. Amusingly, even if I bought the “570/970 all star watch faces”, which include an analogue, this has the same data field limitations.
I just can’t get over how a simple thing could just ruin a watch.
Also, am wondering why the data field limitation doesn’t come up in reviews. Is it that it’s not common to try the CIQ options (note not complaining about reviews, just curious).
i’ve not written a review yet 😉
Ha, fair point!!! And very fun to get a response, enjoy your site and appreciate your attention to this issue!
If it helps, one of the CIQ developers provided this list of metrics that are not currently available:
“Several users have requested additional metrics for my watch faces. Currently, these features are not available:
Training Readiness Score
Training Load Focus
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
Sleep Score
Tide Information”
yeah those features (all?) are ones that are used to differentiate between devices. so they are important to garmin
i cant think of a reason why they stop watchface developers from using them tho.
I recently upgraded to the 970 from the 965 and I couldn’t believe that the only watch face on the 965 that was acceptable to me and not fugly is not present on the 970. 😫 I’m talking about the very minimal watch face with just the time and an indication of seconds as small ribs around the edge.
it is a bizarre situation
you and I obviously have taste! unlike the watchface designer.