Android Wear on iOS: Setup and first impressions [Video]

Android Wear finally has iOS support after Google pushed its iPhone-compatible software to the App Store. This means that Android has beaten Apple Watch to the cross-platform game. Or, at least it would, if iOS didn’t restrict it to a state of almost uselessness. The only device officially supported is the LG Watch Urbane although — as we previously revealed — the older generation Android Wear watches do work. I got it set up with my Moto 360, and have been mostly disappointed by my experience so far.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzbv4dBefI]

My Moto 360 runs the latest Android Wear 1.3 build, and with any Android smartphone is capable of a great many things. I have a plethora of watch faces available to download from the Play Store, some of them interactive, and many, many apps to interact with by voice command or touchscreen gesture.  To go from that, to only being able to see calendar events, weather, reminders and Gmail is anticlimactic to say the least. At worst, I was expecting to be able to see SMS message notifications and not much else, but I don’t even have those. Regardless of hardware, new or old, this restriction won’t change with iOS until Apple says so.

My other frustrations I feel are mostly to do with having a 1 year-old smartwatch. Voice commands take forever to register and load, and even when it looked like it was about to do something, I’d get a pop up notification telling me my phone was no longer connected. Nothing has worked properly, apart from the very first few minutes of setting up and going through the simple tutorial. To say it has been a waste of time would be putting it mildly.

If you haven’t downloaded the Android Wear app for your iPhone yet, and still want to give it a try, you can download it here for free.