A little hackery gets most Gear functions working with Google’s latest smartphone
One of the major barriers to Galaxy Gear ownership is the watch’s lack of support for non-Samsung smartphones. But now it seems it’s possible to get most of the Gear’s functions working in conjunction with the Nexus 5, possibly opening the door to it working — unofficially, of course — with additional third-party Android devices.
Smartwatch Fans has details of a manual install method first discovered on the XDA forums that gets the Gear Manager app and a slew of other APKs loaded onto the Nexus 5. It’s a long-winded process involving pulling files out of the Gear Manager APK and installing them manually — but it eventually gets the Gear up and running with the N5, with everything except S Voice and Weather working properly.
While the process seems to work with the Nexus 5 on Android 4.4.2, we didn’t have any luck repeating it on the Moto X or Sony Xperia Z1, so your mileage may vary. And of course there’s no guarantee this loophole won’t be closed in a future Gear update.
If you’re still interested in fooling around with the Galaxy Gear on unsupported devices, hit up the source link to get started.