Android Wear is a rather useful addition to your arsenal of technology, but getting to know a completely new device can be overwhelming. Here’s everything you need to know about setting up, tweaking, and using your new Android Wear watch.
This guide has been updated to include features from Android Wear 1.4 based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow.
How to Pair Your Watch with Your Phone
When you first turn on your watch, you’ll be greeted with the welcome screen. Swipe to the left to choose your language and continue, swiping through the instructions until you see a code.
On your phone, make sure Bluetooth is turned on, and download the Android Wear app from the Google Play Store and start it up. You should see the same code that appears on your watch face, as shown below. Tap it to pair your watch with your phone.
You will see a popup on your phone asking to pair. Check the box to allow your watch to access your contacts and call history and tap Pair.
Once paired, your watch may update its software, after which it will scan your phone for Android Wear-compatible apps and sync them.
While it does that, you may see a new notification on your phone to add your watch as a “trusted device” for Android’s Smart Lock feature. This allows you to unlock your phone without a PIN as long as it’s connected to your watch–which is very convenient. I recommend turning this on, so tap the notification and tap “Add a Trusted Device”.
Your watch is now paired with your phone. It will take you through a brief tutorial, after which you’ll land on the default watch face, ready to start using it.
How to Change Your Watch Face
Okay, let’s be honest–you’d like to learn how to use your watch, but before that, you’ll probably want to change the watch face. Don’t worry, it was the first thing we did too. To change your watch face, press and hold on the screen. A sliding menu will pop up with all your watch face options. You can swipe left and right to see them all, and tap on a watch face to enable it.
Some watch faces may have extra settings, denoted by the gear icon under them. Tap the gear icon to access those extra settings. This could include anything from colors and styles to which information your watch face shows. For example, if you aren’t interested in how many steps you’ve taken, you can change that part of the watch face to show your next alarm instead.
Swipe from the left screen edge to exit and go back to your watch face.
You can also download new watch faces, but we’ll discuss this later in the guide. For now, it’s time to learn the basics.
The Basic Swipes and Gestures of Android Wear
To navigate Android Wear, you’ll use a series of swipes and taps.
First, let’s talk about the watch face. Your watch actually has two “faces”. When you’re using the watch, you’ll see the full watch face, often including info like battery, weather, and the date. However, after a few seconds of inaction, the watch screen will go into “Ambient Mode”, dimming the screen and showing a more minimalist version of the face, without all the extra info. This helps save your watch’s battery, only showing you the info you need when you really need it.
When the watch is dimmed, Tap the screen (you may have to hold for half a second or so) to see the full version of your watch face. Some watches will also switch to the full watch face automatically when you turn your wrist to look at the watch, though in our experience with the Fossil Q Founder this was a little hit-or-miss.
You can then wait a few seconds for the watch to re-dim, or press the face of the watch with your palm to dim the screen right away.
Swipe up from the bottom edge of the main watch face to view your notifications (if you have any) and Google Now cards. We’ll discuss more about notifications in the next section.
Swipe down from the top edge for the quick settings screen, which includes silencing notifications, giving your watch a brightness boost, or going into “Theater Mode”, which turns off the screen and notifications until you press the side button. Once on the quick settings screen, swipe left and right to access all these options.
Swipe from the right edge to access all your apps. You can also press and hold the side button to get to this screen. You’ll see your recently used apps at the top, with a full list below it. (We’ll talk about apps later in this article). You can swipe right again to see your contacts list, and a third time to get to Google’s voice actions (which we’ll also discuss in a later section).
How Notifications Work
When you receive a notification, your watch will vibrate and a popup will appear showing a full preview of the message or alert. If you do nothing with it, the next time you look at your watch, you’ll see a notification bar along the bottom giving you a peek at the notifications you have yet to see. You can swipe up on this bar at any time to return to the full preview.
If the notification is particularly long–like an email message–you can tap on the preview to read the entire message.
To dismiss a notification, swipe from left to right. That notification will disappear and the next notification in line will appear (or, if you have no notifications, it’ll take you to your Google Now cards). You can swipe up for an option to undo the dismissal, and swipe up again to return to the main watch face.
If you swipe from right to left on a notification, however, you’ll get a number of options specific to that app. For example, swiping left on an email will give you the option to archive, delete, or reply to it.
Every app will also have an option for “Open on Phone”, which opens the notification on your phone, or “Block App”, which prevents that app from sending notifications to your watch in the future. (You can unblock an app from the Android Wear app on your phone, as described in the last section of this article.)
If you choose to reply to the message, you’ll get a number of options: you can dictate a message with your voice, draw an emoji, or choose from one of Google’s many pre-written responses, like “Yes” or “On my way”.
If you have multiple notifications, you can scroll through them by swiping up. You can also flick your wrist toward you or away from you to scroll through them.
In the latest version of Android Wear, you can also “pivot” your arm up and down to select cards or go back. Essentially, this gesture acts the same as tapping/swiping to the right, and swiping to the left, respectively.
Lastly, you can shake your wrist back and forth to exist whatever screen you’re on and return to the watch face.
Control Everything With Your Voice
Like many Android phones, your watch is also always listening for your commands. At any time, you can say “OK, Google” to bring up the Voice Actions screen. You can say any command out loud, but Google gives a few examples in a list you can tap to pick as well.
You can say things like:
- “Take a note…” to create a new note in a note-taking app like Google Keep or Wunderlist
- “Remind me to…” or “Set a reminder…” to create a Google Now reminder
- “Show me my steps” to see Google Fit data
- “Send a text to…” or “Email…” to send a message to one of your contacts
- “Send a Hangouts message to…” to send a message with Google Hangouts. You can also send Nextplus, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, and WhatsApp messages.
- “Agenda for today” or “Agenda for [date]” to see your upcoming calendar events
- “Navigate to…” to start navigating to an address, or to a location like “a gas station nearby”
- “Set a timer for…” or “Set an alarm for…” to set a timer or alarm. You can also “Start stopwatch” or “Show alarms“.
- “Call a car” to use an app like Lyft or Uber to call a car
- “Play music” to either launch your phone’s preferred music app, or start playing music with the Google Play Music app on your watch, without your phone connected. Note: You’ll need Bluetooth headphones paired to your watch in order to listen to music on it.
- “Start a workout“, “Start a run“, or “Start a bike ride” to start a workout in Google Fit or supported apps, like Endomondo or Map My Ride
Each of these actions has a default app associated with it out of the box, but you can change them to the app of your choice. Open the Android Wear app on your phone and tap the Settings icon in the upper right-hand corner. Under “Device settings”, tap the name of your device, and go to “Actions”. From there, you can choose which supported app is associated with each voice action.
We’ll discuss more of the settings later on in this article.
Install New Apps and Watch Faces
All the apps on your watch are synced from your phone. So, if you want to download more apps for your Android Wear watch, you’ll do so from the Google Play Store on your phone or in your web browser.
You can find Android Wear-compatible apps in the Android Wear section of the Play Store. Some are apps you may be familiar with from your phone already, while others were built specifically to be used on your watch, like Calculator for Android Wear. You can even find games for your watch, like Solitaire Wear.
You can also download new watch faces for your device. Strangely, it doesn’t seem there is a dedicated category for watch faces in Google Play, but they have a few categories for recommended watch faces and designer watch faces. For everything else, just search “watch face” in the store and you’ll find tons of others.
To use an app, just swipe from the right edge of the screen and tap on an app’s icon. Many will take advantage of your watch’s features in a way that’s even more convenient than their phone counterparts. For example, if you bring up a Google Keep note on your watch, it will stay on the screen, even if the watch dims. This is great if, for example, you’re using it as a grocery list–no more needing to constantly unlock your phone to check your list. Just glance at your watch.
Some apps don’t have an icon on the watch, but will pop up when you use an app on your phone. For example, if you start Android’s camera app, your watch will display a self-timer button perfect for group shots. Set up the phone, jump into the shot, and press the shutter on your watch to take the photo.
Tweak Your Android Watch’s Settings
Your Android watch has quite a few options that let you customize your experience. To open the settings on your watch, swipe left to open the app drawer, and tap the Settings icon. Here you can adjust the brightness, change the font size, or turn certain features (like always-on screen or wrist gestures) on or off.
You can also set a pattern lock on your watch, though despite the watch’s claim that it’ll lock the watch when you take it off, this feature is broken in our experience. You can still manually lock it form the Settings screen if you like, though.
You can connect your watch to a Wi-Fi network in the settings, which will allow your watch to stay connected to your phone even if it’s out of Bluetooth’s short range. That way, you can leave your phone on the other end of the house, but still access all your apps from your watch. Note that Wi-Fi will automatically disconnect after two hours or so in order to save battery. You can tweak this feature by going to Settings > Wi-Fi > Advanced > Power Save After and changing the timeout time.
Lastly, the latest version of Android Wear has a useful “Permissions” option in the settings, that lets you decide which apps have access to what features on your phone. For example, I don’t use Google Fit, so I can block it from tracking my location and using sensors to count my steps. Some have reported this helps save battery.
You can tweak other watch settings on your phone. Open the Android Wear app and click the settings icon in the upper right-hand corner. You can adjust which calendars show up on your watch, block or unblock apps from sending notifications to your watch, mute alerts and calls on your phone whenever it’s connected to your watch, and more. You can also turn on Android Wear’s “Together” feature to pair your watch with a friend, allowing you to instantly send pictures, emojis, and other updates straight to your friend’s watch face.
At the top of the settings screen, under “Device settings”, tap on your watch to see device-specific options. You can turn off the always-on screen, tilt gesture, and card previews, as well as adjust the default apps (as we described earlier). You can also see information about your watch’s battery and storage.
Android Wear can seem a little confusing and overwhelming at first, even for tech-savvy folks. After all, it’s an entirely new kind of device most of us have never used before. But once you get the hang of the basics and tweak the settings to your liking, it’s actually a very simple–not to mention useful–addition to your collection of tech tools.