TL;DR
- Samsung’s aging Galaxy Watch 4 is vulnerable to a display failure where the screen turns solid red.
- The only solution for affected hardware seems to be a screen replacement.
- While failures have been happening for years, it’s hard to ignore a recent surge in reports.
It’s sure looking like we could only be just a few more weeks away from getting our formal introduction to Samsung’s next-gen smartwatches, the Galaxy Watch 8 series. And while we’re excited to check out the new design this year, we’re also happy to see Samsung keeping up its support for its older wearables, preparing its One UI 8 Watch update for them now. Inevitably, though, the very oldest will one day be left behind, and it’s looking like we’re getting to that point for the Galaxy Watch 4. And maybe that’s why the recent string of device failures we’ve been hearing about feels all the more frustrating.
Electronics break, and with mobile devices especially, the threats can be nearly constant — it’s a small miracle that we’re not constantly smashing smartwatches on doorknobs. And when it comes to Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4, one failure mode we’ve known about seems to manifest as an orange/red screen that’s otherwise non-responsive. Users have been running into this occasionally for years, as we see in this 2023 Reddit post from rrrocky777, or this 2024 post from SoaibMostafa on Samsung’s own support forums.
None of that’s great, but sporadic failures are one thing. Now, this is hardly a proper statistical analysis of these incidents, but in our recent efforts looking through posts in Reddit’s Galaxy Watch sub, we’ve noticed what feels like a pronounced uptick in reports of this specific failure mode. Just this past week alone, we see posts from users Current_Context_9513, Chckn_Nugget, and cokeplantcp all complaining about the same “red screen of death.”
With that latter report we get a little extra insight into how the failure may be manifesting on affected watches, initially appearing as an overwhelming red tint but still showing the watch face, before fading into nothingness over the course of about 20 minutes — you can see the pics they shared up top.
At this point in 2025, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a Galaxy Watch 4 that’s out of warranty, and if this happens to you, your only recourse may be paying Samsung for a screen replacement. That said, the Watch 4 has had a good run, and upsetting as it may be to see a beloved wearable give up the ghost, perhaps it’s high time for an upgrade?
