Watch complications disappear from watch face selection menu

I got an update. I worked with Apple Support every day for a few days at a time. For some reason, we could not capture logs from my phone, and they were really honing in on having to do some surgical work on my account. However, just last night I got a call. It turns out that I am one of the lucky first adopters of what they have officially dubbed an "emerging issue." Aka, it's not just me and my partner in the world with it!! Which is very validating. They have a whole post now internally about it and technicians can flag their cases with it so they can keep track of who has the bug. There's no ETA on a fix right now, but since it is a known thing, it will be taken care of. Eventually. Whether it's an iOS patch or something that will be pushed out just to affected users has yet to be decided. And, if there are ever any updates on it, my technician will be notified to call me and update me as well. So I'll be staying in the loop.

Sure, scroll up and take a look at other users' screenshots of their full sets of complications both on their watches and in the face gallery. I'd love to see an screenshot of your own watch face gallery and face selection. Apple had me send screenshots and videos and escalated it to the engineers because they had never seen it before. Also, in testing today, the complications that don't show permanently disappear from the menu if they are changed. Below is my actual watch face, followed by what my phone + selection screen think the watch face is (with the missing complications), then how the "off" is indeed still tied to the complication it's supposed to be, then how the entire option disappears from the menu if that complication is changed to anything else. This happens on every watch face, even new ones from the face gallery, persisting even after fully setting up the watch from new.

Definitely not normal. While the time being "wrong" for certain ones (like some digital ones always showing 10:09) is expected, the complications disappearing is new. I believe this only started happening around watchOS 26. I've had an Apple Watch since series 3 and disappearing complications was never a thing before now. Also, it's always random complications disappearing, even for the same face. Sometimes I am only missing one, sometimes all, sometimes only a few.

For what it's worth, the behavior is also new for my partner as well. Thinking on it, I don't think it started right on the original 26 release, but likely between that and 26.1.

And, one more thing I remembered - at exactly the same time, the Flow faces no longer show their color. They are only grey until selected, unlike before where the color would show in the selection screen.

It happens on both 16 Pro and Air, and I'm on 26.3. I actually got on the phone Apple Support last night, they had me video it, replicate the behavior, captured logs from my phone, and escalated it up to their engineers. I've got a followup with them in a few days. I didn't realize they'd go to such lengths to resolve this. But I'll keep the thread updated. They were especially curious that the bug extended to the other account thru Family Sharing. We'll see what happens!

Brother I have. I have unpaired and repaired and set up from backup AND set up as new. Even as a fresh watch with no backup, the issue persists. I've tried with two different phones entirely. I nuked all settings on my phone and had to set that all up again. I completely reinstalled the Watch app, with fresh settings on my phone, setting up the watch as new. The only thing I haven't done is nuke my entire iCloud/Apple ID and make a whole new one for both me and my partner over it, which to be honest at that point I'd just go back to Android, as much as I'd like to avoid that...

I originally thought it must be an OS issue when I posted this. I thought it must be something other users are experiencing. Usually if iOS is bugged, it's bugged for a lot of people. But as this case has developed, it's starting to become clear that there's nothing I can do, and Apple will have to fix something server-side. Something with iCloud is propagating broken references to both accounts and I just have no idea what. I never thought this would be unique to me until I got minorly dogpiled here.

Sorry, I was just feeling a bit frustrated and invalidated since it seemed no one believed me. I just completely wiped my phone, factory settings, and set up the watch as new. Issue persists. I’m fully convinced the issue isn’t fully local and is server-side now. I will say I no longer experience where the complications become permanently removed from the menu, so at least SOME is broken local data, but I almost guarantee that if I try to restore it, it’ll break that badly again. I’m half tempted to make an entirely new apple ID for testing, set it all up, and see if it persists on a new account. But I’m just going to leave it in this half broken state and when Apple calls me again, we’ll try one more time to see if they can fetch logs from my phone. My partner’s watch is still having the same issue even when removed from family sharing so something is definitely persisting in our accounts. As of right now, I’m at square one, where the complications disappear from the face selection and face gallery on my phone. I’m almost afraid to try to switch to the Air again and see how it behaves there. I’ll hold off on installing all my stuff again too just so engineers can see I have a completely clean slate.

For what it's worth, it happens on both 16 Pro and the Air, as well as my partner's 16 Pro Max. It's looking like it's server-side with my iCloud account and not local. It *** because I can no longer create new watch faces correctly. If one of the sample watches has missing complications (which they all do), I cannot use that complication at all... I think my followup with Apple is on Thursday or Friday so hopefully their engineers have an answer by then.

[Edited by Moderator]