For those iPhone users who envied people wearing numerous different designs of Android Wear smartwatches, good news, Android Wear is now compatible with your iPhone. For now Android Wear smartwatches will work on the iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, 6 and 6 Plus running iOS 8.2 or above.
But there is a limitation, at present only the LG Watch Urbane, Huawei Watch and the Asus ZenWatch 2 are compatible with iOS. But Google has said that future watches from Motorola, Huawei, Asus and LG would come with iOS support baked in.
With Android Wear on iOS there's a lot to choose from. On one hand here you have just the Apple Watch, even in all its glory it presents just one design, with different bands to choose from. However, these are multiple sizes, multiple designs, form-factors even, when it comes to Android Wear smartwatches. Its tough to ignore the popularity of the Apple Watch though, even with just a single product Apple is now the second biggest player in the wearable space.
Getting back to Android Wear, Google has done some workarounds to get these compatible. Here are some of the functions that work with your iPhone:
- You will get App notifications, Calls and Message notifications on your smartwatch with ability to dismiss them smartwatch
- You can track your fitness goals, as you would on an Android device.
- Google Now cards are also supported.
- You can customize the watch faces, voice search also works including setting reminders through Google Now.
- Rich notifications available for Google Apps.
- Google has made Android Wear for iOS far more feature-rich than expected given Apple's locked down system. It has better functionality than Pebble. But for now there's no support for 3rd-party apps for Android Wear, meaning no customizable watch faces other than those that come with your watch.
The question that needs to be answered here is whether iPhone users were ever interested in Android Wear smartwatches? Yes, there are a lot of options to choose from when it comes to Android Wear and they are relatively cheap compared to the Apple Watch but presumably if I were an iOS user I would just wait for the prices of the Apple Watch to come down for a more consistent experience.
Source: Google
