Android Wear OS Is Bringing These Exciting Features To Smartwatches
At MWC 2023 in Barcelona, Google is making it presence known by announcing a couple of QOL features to Wear OS (as well as for Android). These improvements should give Pixel Watch and Wear OS 3+ smartwatch owners added productivity, most notably with its core Keep app and accessibility features.
Presently, Wear OS has a tile to add a new note. While that's convenient, it's a multi-step process—you need to swipe from the home screen to the Keep tile, then choose between adding a new note or list. Granted, that method is much quicker than finding and launching the app itself from the app shelf.
Now, Keep will gain customizations that watch users can add to their watch face, which means new notes or to-dos can be created directly from your watches home screen. However, Google does not have a running list of which stock watch faces are compatible with the Keep customizations, so it'll require some experimentation on your part.
Another big announcement that we're happy to see is for new audio and visual accessibility tools. Wear OS is getting a mono-audio option. If you prefer to listen to audio only in one ear (through your connected Bluetooth earbud, for example) or have better hearing in one ear, you can activate mono audio to combine left-right channels into one.
Color correction and grayscale modes are new as well. These two modes work similarly to color filters and high-contrast themes on most desktop OSes which aid visibility for users with color blindness or certain other vision impairments.
Mountain View says that these Wear OS features will be dropping within Q1 2023, but do let us know if you're seeing the updates for your Wear OS 3+ device—we'd love to hear what you think!
