Tech —

Android Wear on iOS: A hobbled, Google-centric smartwatch experience

There's little reason to mix-and-match your phone and watch OSes.

You can do this, but maybe don't?
Enlarge / You can do this, but maybe don't?
Google

You can use Android Wear smartwatches with iPhones now. You shouldn't, but you can.

That's not a value judgment of Android Wear relative to the Apple Watch or WatchOS—both platforms do a lot of the same things, at least when paired to a phone running the same OS. It's more about what Google (or any third-party wearable vendor) can actually do on Apple's platform, which despite recent progress still restricts third-party hardware and software from doing many of the things that first-party hardware and software can do.

The ability to pair an Android watch with an Apple phone is conceptually interesting but functionally, it's a lose-lose proposition. Android Wear watches can't do most of the things they can do when paired with Android phones, and your iPhone can't be extended through an Android watch the way it can with the Apple Watch. It's an experiment that may yield results one day, but that day isn't today.

Hardware compatibility

Google's official announcement claims that only new Android Wear watches will work with iPhones, but there aren't actually any hard technical limitations that will keep any existing Android wear watch from working with an iPhone. We used an LG G Watch R for our testing, and others have successfully used the original G Watch (one of the first two Android Wear watches released) and the Moto 360 among others. The iOS app recognizes all of the watches correctly and works without issue.

The caveat there is that your watch needs to be running the current version of Android Wear—as of this writing, that's Android Wear 1.3, which is based on Android 5.1.1. If you go out and buy an older watch in a store right now, it's probably going to need a software update, but if it can't connect to an iPhone in the first place it's not going to be able to grab an update. If you have a watch lying around at home, pair it to an Android device, update it, and reset it. More adventurous, experienced users could also update the watches using recovery mode and manually downloaded OTA update files.

On the iPhone side, the hardware requirements are the same as they are for the Apple Watch: an iPhone 5 or newer running iOS 8.2 or later (we used an iPhone 6 running the latest public iOS 9 beta).

Pairing

Pairing Wear with iOS works basically the same way it does in Android. Download the Wear app from the App Store, make sure your watch is turned on and waiting to be paired, and then open the app and follow the directions.

The first-time setup process turns on Bluetooth data sharing and grants the watch access to all the stuff that iOS is willing to give it—location data, your calendar, and notifications are the big ones. You'll also be asked if you'd like to sign in to your Google account, which Android Wear really needs if it's going to be more than a barebones notification window.

Once you've paired the watch, you can go into the settings to customize a few things. You can pick which calendar app (Apple's or Google's) you'd like to use, whether you're signed in to your Google account and are using Google Now, what apps you'd like to block notifications from, and whether you want to use rich Gmail notifications.

If your phone and watch come unpaired at any point, it's not as seamless as reconnecting an Apple Watch (or an Android Wear watch to an Android phone). iOS limits the number of things the Wear app can do in the background, so when you're trying to reconnect you need to launch the app and then tap the reconnection card on your watch. Not such a huge deal when things are working fine, but once I needed to entirely reboot my phone before the two would see each other and reconnect properly.

When paired with an Android phone, you can install new Android Wear apps via the Play Store, and you've got a wide variety of watch faces to choose from. That's not the case in the iOS version, which offers no apps and a limited subset of faces. Right off the bat the watch is less customizable and extensible, and you only notice more of those gaps as you use the watch.

Channel Ars Technica