Ron Amadeo
Weak, dying Wear OS.
Apparently the Google Assistant on Wear OS has been broken for months, and so far no one at Google has noticed it. About four months ago, diehard Wear OS users started a thread in the public Android edition tracker saying that the “OK Google” keyword no longer works on Wear OS, and several claim that the feature has been broken for months is. Recently, news about the 900-user-strong thread spilled over to the Android subreddit, and after 9to5Google and other news sites picked it up, Google finally commented on the issue.
The Verge quoted a Google spokesman as saying that the company was “aware of the issues some users were facing” and that it would “pay attention and improve the overall experience”. Google has not given an ETA on how long it will take. Google offered a similar response to the hob in the November thread, with a representative saying, “We’ve shared it with our engineering team and will continue to provide updates as more information becomes available.”
Wear OS’s broken voice system is the latest in a long line of signs that Wear OS is a dead platform and that it has been abandoned by Google. Google’s last major update for Wear OS was in 2018, and many of Google’s newer services chose not to support the platform. Google Play Music had a standalone online search app for Wear OS, which was great if anyone was jogging and wanted to leave their phone at home. Play Music is now dead and its replacement, YouTube Music, supports the Apple Watch, but not Wear OS. Google Hangouts is another dying Google app that had a lot of support for Wear OS, but its replacement, Google Chat, does not support the OS. Updating Google Fit a few months ago killed the weight training feature of Wear OS, which was one of the best parts of the platform.
Wear OS’s hardware was also a disaster. Qualcomm suffocated the platform by letting it go for six years without a significant SoC upgrade, resulting in slow hardware struggling to use the latest features. Every major hardware company that once supported Wear OS – brands like Samsung, LG, Motorola, Huawei, Asus and Sony – has abandoned it. Wear OS devices are now only sold by fashion brands.
Google’s new venture into portable space is with Fitbit, a company it recently acquired for $ 2.1 billion. Years ago, Fitbit was a pioneer in simple, inexpensive step counters, but today the company is also a single-digit market share. Fitbit could not adapt to low pressure from cheap Chinese fitness trackers and high competition from the Apple Watch. It’s not clear how combining Fitbit’s weakened portable business with Google’s weakened portable items division will lead to any kind of success, but at this point we can just wait and see.