Google gave us a little present to round off August yesterday by announcing that Android Wear now plays nice with the iPhone.
For months we’ve been hearing about Google’s ongoing progress to bring its wearable OS to the land of the iPhone and as of August 31st, the company finally launched Android Wear on the Apple App Store.
In a post on Google’s official blog the company promised those rocking an iPhone 5 or newer and running iOS 8.2 or newer that they’d be able to download the Android Wear iOS app and pair up their smartwatch of choice straight out the box. That is with one key exception.
Officially speaking, Google claims that only Android Wear devices from the LG Watch Urbane onwards will play nice with iOS, citing the Asus ZenWatch 2 and Huawei Watch as the other supported launch devices. However, tests from curious users have revealed that older Android Wear watches such as the original Motorola Moto 360 also appear to work without too much trouble, save for some laggy performance issues here and there.
Despite the inherent difficulty in bringing Android experiences onto iOS, the app and the interplay between iPhone and Android Wear(able) appear to be fairly robust.
Users can expect fitness tracking, voice search, Google Now cards and notification support just as they’d find when pairing their wearable to an Android phone, but presently some features are still off limits to iOS users, such as being able to install third-party apps for Android Wear, with the exception of watch faces, thankfully.
Whilst the Apple Watch may still be the most fitting companion to your iPhone, now having the option of Android Wear on the table opens users up to a far greater breadth of interesting and varied hardware – with circular displays, more material choices and perhaps most importantly, new price points.
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