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Android Wear features can now arrive via Google Play for more timely improvements
August 11, 2025
You’d be forgiven for thinking thatGooglewas over and done with Android Wear, given the dearth of smartwatch news at itsrecent product launch event— not to mention the Android Wear section’s subsequentremoval from the Google Store. However, Google has still been working on the platform lately and, in a message on the Android Wear developers page on Google+ (viaAndroid Police), Google’s Hoi Lam detailed a significant change to the way the team is now handling its updates.
Lam says that, in a bid to roll out more improvements between smartwatch OTAs, some new features will arrive through the Google Play Store. This is part of a trend we have been seeingmore ofin the past couple of years with Android smartphone manufacturers creating individual Play Store versions of apps usually baked into their own UIs. This is usually done for the same reason: so that OEMs can roll out individual updates rather than waiting to bundle a number of upgrades together in one over-the-air update.
In fact, Lam said that one of these Play Store rollouts had already occurred last week and included:
This seems like another positive step for Android Wear, though it seems like the platform isn’t growing at a particularly impressive rate. Earlier this year, it was suggested that the Android Wear platform might have even beenovertakenby Samsung’s Tizen smartwatch OS. But neither offer much in the way of must-have features that you may’t get with a smartphone. Until they do, smartphones are likely to remain relatively niche.
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