Google announces Wear OS redesign
Google has announced a new and improved look to its wearable platform, Wear OS, that includes a new notification stream, an activity feed, and a Google Assistant feed. Read more: https://zd.net/2MFUfZL
Regular readers know that Google’s Wear OS is not my favorite platform for wearables and it doesn’t help that there is very little in the way of modern Wear OS hardware. However, Wear OS has the potential to be great so it is with interest I follow the news and am pleased when Google shows it continues to develop for this platform.
Google announced its new Tiles feature for Wear OS that provides swipeable access to key information. Current supported Tiles include Goals, Next event, Forecast (weather), Heart rate, Headlines and Timer. Granted, Tiles is not close to matching what we see on the Samsung Galaxy Watch with its rotating bezel and powerful Tizen OS optimized for watches, but this feature looks better than what we see now on Wear OS.
As described in our recent Google Fit for iOS article, the goals section of Wear OS is focused on Move Minutes and Heart Points. These two metrics and your progress towards achieving targets are shown on the Goals Tile.
You can touch and drag on the Tiles to order them to your preference. Google also stated that it will continue to add Tiles over time.
The new Tiles will start rolling out to Wear OS watches over the next month. Features will vary by phone OS, watch, or country.
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