There is now a little more choice if you’re in the market for a smartwatch but own Apple’s iPhone, as Google has made Android Wear compatible with Apple’s smartphones.
The iPhone is no longer an Apple Watch only affair, with this week Google releasing Android Wear on the Apple App Store for iPhone, making quite a few Apple smartphones talk to the odd Android Wear smartwatch.
Provided the watch has been updated to the most recent version of Android Wear, you should find that Google’s iOS Android Wear app picks up on the watch and allows you to pair it with an iPhone, this despite Google suggesting that the app will only work with LG’s Watch Urbane, the most recent Android smartwatch release pre-installed with the most recent Android Wear version.
Testing it with a newly updated G Watch R, we found the iPhone picked up on the Android Watch, providing us with notifications from the various apps we were running on our LG smartwatch, and offering the Apple Watch some stiff circular competition.
Going back to a square interface, even LG’s original G Watch pairs once it has gone through the Android Wear updates, telling us if you want to make any Android Wear watch work, you’ll need to use an Android to update it to the most recent version of Google’s wearable operating system.
After syncing, we found LG’s assortment of watch faces here, but as a point, you can’t get other Android watch faces to run natively here as there’s no way of getting them on the device, seeing that you technically would have to get them through the App Store, and Android Wear has only just appeared, plus we’re not even sure if Apple would let these through.
Still, it’s a good step for anyone not keen on the Apple Watch who owns an iPhone as it does mean you’ll be able to find other smartwatches for the iPhone soon enough, provided you have an iPhone 5 or higher.
