Android Wear Battery Saver Mode on Android Oreo Will Now Vibrate on Priority Notifications

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Android Oreo has brought in a lot of changes to improve the stock Battery Saver Mode. During the dev previews, we’ve seen Google change the status/navbar color to red instead of bright orange. And you can even customize it to your liking in the latest builds! But they say it’s the little things that count, after all. Onto the final builds, Google has added a small but significant accessibility tweak for Android Wear on AOSP.

Now, if you set Battery Saver Mode on your Android Wear device running Oreo, your watch will vibrate whenever a priority notification arrives. This change means that, while messages and other notifications won’t vibrate, you won’t miss out on the important stuff (like alarms). This is a really small tweak, but a necessary one, as most Android Wear smart watches actually lack a speaker. Only a handful of watches, like the Huawei Watch, feature a speaker. However, keep in mind that this change will only work on watches, alarms on Android phones will not vibrate as they all have speakers.

This change was committed to AOSP on June 6th, and it should be included on the next version of Android Wear (either 2.1 or 3.0), which will be based on Android Oreo. You can test it out then by enabling battery saver mode, setting an alarm, and then send a test Hangouts message. The alarm should vibrate, while the message should not.

This tweak alone should give you much more peace of mind, as you can leave your watch on battery saver mode without worrying about missing alarms or the like. However, this is not something we can immediately enjoy. We should know more about the next Android Wear version soon enough as well, which will feature this and much more other new features and improvements.