Google

Google / Ron Amadeo

Google

Google

Google / Ron Amadeo

Google

Google

Google

Ahead of the IFA 2018 tech expo in Berlin, Google is announcing a major upgrade to Wear OS. The release doesn't have a catchy name (it should be labeled "Wear OS 1.6" on the about screen), but nearly every major interface of Wear OS is changing. Ahead of the announcement, I got to see the new release in person for a few minutes, so I can explain how things work a bit.

The new Wear OS design prioritizes actionable notifications, proactive (Google Now-like) information cards, and Google Fit information. The all-new layout seems faster and less swipe-heavy, and it makes the OS feel more like the regular phone version of Android.

Notifications are one of the most important parts of a smartwatch OS, and Wear OS has seen a big improvement here. First, the heavily paginated style of old Wear OS/Android Wear releases is dead. In days gone by, you would get one notification per screen, so if you had five notifications, that meant five vertical swipes to read them all. The process was slow and a lot of work. Now—like regular Android—notifications live in a single panel that you can freely scroll through. With no pagination, all the momentum-based scrolling tricks are at your disposal—fling to get to the bottom, or give the panel a medium-power flick to scroll past multiple notifications at once. The new design feels way faster.

Just like Android on a phone, each notification can be swiped away horizontally to dismiss it. Tapping on a notification will expand it in line, showing automatically generated smart replies that can be sent with a single tap or action buttons like "Archive" and "Reply" for Gmail. At the bottom of the expanded notification is an "open app" button.

A new layout puts important screens a swipe away from the main watch face. Just like in Wear OS now, you can pull down the Quick Settings panel from above or scroll down to see your notifications, but now the Google Assistant lives to the left of the watch face while Google Fit lives to the right. Before, horizontally scrolling would only switch watch faces—now the watch-face picker lives under a long press.

Assistant gets an assist

The Google Assistant has been revamped with a focus on proactive notification—essentially Google Now cards. Previous versions of Android Wear would weave them into the notification panel, but now, just like on an Android phone, the Google stream lives in a separate area to the left of the home screen. On Wear OS, the stream lists things like the weather, calendar info, traffic information to your favorite places, and information from your Gmail account like reservations and package tracking info. Like the notification panel, this is a large single list, making it easy to scan through with a flick.

In each Google Now card, you'll occasionally see "contextual action chips"—tappable buttons that suggest relevant related commands you can give to the Google Assistant. Discovering all the things you can say to Google's voice assistant isn't easy, so these buttons aim to nudge you out of your command comfort zone and teach you more voice commands.

After announcing a revamped Google Fit last week, Wear OS gets the revamped fitness rings baked into the OS. Just scroll to the right screen to check your progress. It lists your "Move Minutes" and the harder-to-earn "Heart Points," and it gives you a button to jump right into an activity.

With just about every major interface getting an overhaul, I think calling this release something like "Wear OS 3.0" would have made sense. Google says the update doesn't have a name, though, which makes it just another entry in the confusing, difficult-to-track line of Wear OS updates. Android Wear—before the Wear OS rebrand—started at 1.0, had a major release with version 2.0 , and made it all the way to 2.9. When the rebrand to Wear OS happened, the version numbers on the "About device" screen reset to version 1.0 , and the counting started over. The current version (before this overhaul) is Wear OS 1.5. New Wear OS versions get released every month with a +0.1 increment, so next month's release with this new interface should be version Wear OS 1.6. Wouldn't it have been easier and clearer to keep incrementing the Android Wear numbers?

The new Wear OS seems like a solid upgrade. It's faster to navigate and puts more important information at your fingertips. Decent smartwatch hardware still remains a major issue for Wear OS, though. Google says there are more than 50 Wear OS devices on the market today, but nearly all of them are hamstrung by the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100. Qualcomm's smartwatch SoC is not only two years old, but it is built on manufacturing technology from 2013. Samsung and Apple both have competing smartwatch platforms and can produce their own smartwatch SoCs that blow away Qualcomm's offerings, so no matter how good Google's software is, it's hard to imagine a competitive Wear OS product existing without a major new SoC.

I was told every device with at least "Android Wear 2.0" will be updated to this new version of Wear OS, which should cover just about every watch released in the past year and a half. As for a release date, Google's blog post says it will "begin rolling out these new features over the next month."

Listing image by Google