Google is working to fix one of the most annoying things about Wear OS
It’s not something most users run into very often, but moving a Wear OS device from one phone to another is pain. There’s no mechanism to transfer your watch from your old phone to your new one; you just have to reset it and set it up again from scratch. Ateardown by XDA Developershas revealed that Google’s working on a way to make that process slightly more streamlined: You may soon be able to back up and restore your Wear OS data.
According to XDA, Google Play Services v22.32.12 beta contains numerous references to wearable device backups. The functionality is clearly in the early stages of development, as there are also a handful of related new layouts that are currently empty. New strings found also show that Wear OS backups will be branded as a Google One feature, so it’s likely it’ll be a similar process tobacking up your phone using Google One.
Samsung’sWear OS-based Galaxy Watchesoffer backup and restore functionality already, but the feature is through Samsung, not Google. It doesn’t back up any apps you downloaded through the Play Store or any device settings related to those apps, so if you rely on a lot of Google services on your wrist, it won’t do you much good.
It’s not yet clear what exactly this new Google One feature will back up, or how seamless the process of restoring data from the cloud to your watch will be. With any luck, it’ll make moving your Wear OS watch from one phone to another a shorter, simpler ordeal. It’s also important to bear in mind that, as with most new features we learn about from app teardowns, it may be quite a while before we see this functionality in the wild.
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