Wear OS will be used as an operating system on many smartwatches, including devices from Tag Heuer and Fossil.
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The Wear OS rebranding could nearly fool you into thinking Google cares about wearables, but I don’t buy it.
Google officially announced today a rebranding of its wearable platform from Android Wear to Wear OS.
Just how changing “Android Wear” to “Wear OS by Google” therefore reflects “the people who wear our watches” is anyone’s guess. However, a new name suggests Google is paying attention to its wearable platform after a long time. After several years of fumbled updates and questionable feature changes, Google is wiping the slate clean. Android Wear users won’t need to wait on a full OTA update for their watches. This is unchanged from the 2.0 revamp from a few years ago. The company shipped over 18 million watch shipments for 2017 with 54 per cent growth over 2016 figures, according to research firm Canalys and Apple’s new Watch Series 3 drove most of the growth with a little under 9 million shipments.
At the moment, it is definitely a positive that Google is thinking about the smartwatch, and the software meant for it. It’s hard to blame the hardware manufacturers too much, though, since Qualcomm doesn’t seem committed to producing quality smartwatch SoCs.
It’s a thought process rival Apple has also gone through – the software that runs on the Apple Watch is known as watchOS.
Google’s annual report on Android security is out.
Perhaps the rebrand marks a new-found focus at the company, as it looks toward smartwatches as rare bright light in the stagnating wearables category.
That won’t be the case with Wear OS.
At the time when Apple Watches are leaving behind popular watch brands in terms of earning, Android Wear has not been selling very well. Consumers can pick from brands like Fossil, Guess, Gc, Hugo Boss, Michael Kors, Tommy Hilfiger, and others.
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If you do not have a lock screen and passcode set on the phone, you should add one to prevent unauthorized access to your device from other people (as well as your own body parts).
