Xiaomi may be working on a Wear OS smartwatch called the Mi Watch

While the market for wearable devices is thriving, the demand for smartwatches running Google’s Wear OS is not so hot. The Fossil Group and Mobvoi still support the Android-based smartwatch platform, but the big Android smartphone brands like Samsung and Huawei choose to release smartwatches running their own operating systems. There are many reasons to blame for this situation, but perhaps one solution that could rejuvenate sales in the platform is a surge of affordable smartwatches. Xiaomi is well-known for its wide range of affordable consumer electronics, for example, and they may be preparing to dip their toes into the Wear OS ecosystem with a smartwatch called the Mi Watch.

The other day, Google started to roll out version 2.28 of the Wear OS application. Within this application, a new string called “xiaomi_companion_name” with the value “Mi Wear” appeared. Xiaomi currently offers a “Mi Fit” app on the Google Play Store as well as a “Mi Health” app on its own app store, but there’s currently no “Mi Wear” app.

Looking into the code to see where this string is referenced, we can see that the Wear OS app is checking for the existence of a “PartnerCompanion” app. One of the package names that shows up here is “com.huawei.health,” which corresponds to the Huawei Health app. The Huawei Watch and Watch 2 both ran on Android and not Lite OS like the newer Watch GT smartwatches, so it’s no surprise to see a reference to Huawei Health here. On the other hand, the package name “com.xiaomi.wearable” does not correspond to any app that we can find on the Google Play Store, Xiaomi’s app store, or third-party websites like APKMirror. Like Huawei Health, we can see that this unpublished “Mi Wear” app has a “PartnerService” that the Wear OS app is checking for.

The references to an unpublished Mi Wear app in the Wear OS APK is enough of a clue to tell us that Xiaomi is working on a smartwatch that’s running Android, but further analysis shows that a new smartwatch name has appeared in the code: Mi Watch. While we can’t confirm if this will be the name of Xiaomi’s new smartwatch, it does sound awfully close to the kind of name that Xiaomi would give to a smartwatch. After all, the company’s entire smartwatch, tablet, and TV lineup share the “Mi” branding.

Lastly, we don’t know which company will be manufacturing this product for Xiaomi. Huami, for instance, makes the Mi Band wearable for Xiaomi, so it’s possible that one of Xiaomi’s partners could be making this product. If we learn more about this potential smartwatch, we’ll let you know.

Via: 9to5Google

Thanks to PNF Software for providing us a license to use JEB Decompiler, a professional-grade reverse engineering tool for Android applications.