Wear OS 4 Is Coming To Your Smartwatch This Year — Heres Whats New

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Wear OS 4 Is Coming To Your Smartwatch This Year — Heres Whats New

Wear OS is getting a major update with Wear OS 4, and Google is promising a significant improvement in the overall smartwatch experience.

Announced today at Google I/O 2023, Wear OS 4 brings a host of new system-level and app-level features, making it easier for smartwatch owners to use their devices more productively.

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Later this year, Live Wear OS 4 will improve the battery life of all the devices it runs on. When it comes to battery life, Wear OS has never been particularly good, so the improvements here are welcome. Additionally, the OS update will add "new and improved usability features," including a vastly improved text-to-speech engine that runs faster and more reliably, resulting in silent reading.

While this might not be immediately exciting for non-developer smartwatch owners, Wear OS 4 introduces the Watch Face Format tool, making it easy for developers to create custom watch faces without worrying about battery optimization. While that won't change much for smartwatch users when Wear OS 4 launches, it will bring more interesting watch faces later via Google Play.

In addition to Wear OS 4, Google also announced a number of updates to popular Wear OS apps, including changes to legacy Google apps like Google Home, Gmail, and Calendar. Smart locks and other devices can now be fully controlled from the watches, emails can be managed and sent with advanced text-to-speech capabilities, and all calendar features can be accessed without unlocking the phone.

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In addition to optimizing previous apps, the new custom WhatsApp Wear OS software allows owners to send messages and make calls right from their wrist. New updates and improvements for Spotify and Peloton will also be coming soon to ensure a seamless app experience.

As for the Wear OS 4 release date, we don't know when it will finally be released as we assume it will be "later this year". Upon final release, we expect the update to be available on the Pixel Watch, Galaxy Watch 4, Galaxy Watch 5, and Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, as well as every other Wear OS device.