One of the last announcements from the I/O 2023 keynote is Wear OS 4, as well as more first-party apps for the wearable platform with Gmail and Google Calendar.
Wear OS 4
Wear OS 3 was announced two years ago at I/O, and Google is now following it with Wear OS 4 based on Android 13. Today’s announcement is more of a teaser, starting with battery improvements and a “faster and more reliable text-to-speech experience.”
In a big finally, Wear OS 4 will bring backup and restore support that will let you “securely transfer data and settings from an old watch to your new one.”
And if you’re setting up a watch from your phone, any permissions you’ve granted on your phone will automatically carry over.
A big aspect of the longer battery life on Wear OS 4 is the “Watch Face Format.” Built with Samsung, which has released an update to Watch Face Studio, this is a “declarative XML format to design the appearance and behavior of watch faces.”
This means that there is no executable code involved in creating a watch face, and there will be no code embedded in your watch face APK.
Wear OS will take “care of the logic needed to render the watch face so you no longer have to worry about code optimizations or battery performance.” thus resulting in less maintenance and fewer updates (compared to the Jetpack Watch Face library). A watch face editor will be directly part of Wear OS.
For example, you no longer need to update your watch face to benefit from improvements in performance or battery consumption, or to get the latest bug fixes.
Wear OS 4 is launching “later this year,” and Google will provide more details in the coming months. It’s entering developer preview via emulator today.
Gmail and Google Calendar for Wear OS
As we previously reported, Google is bringing Gmail and Calendar to Wear OS “later this year.” The email client will let you browse your inbox, read, favorite, and quickly respond. Google Calendar offers a schedule view that’s similar to the phone version with the ability to RSVP and complete Google Tasks.
On the third-party front, Google highlighted WhatsApp for Wear OS, which entered beta on Monday, and Peloton. Spotify is soon adding tiles that let you “play new episodes of your favorite podcasts, see what’s in your heavy rotation, and jump into a curated lineup of music chosen for you by Spotify’s DJ.”
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