Fossil paused Wear OS H MR2 update for Gen 5 watches to ‘iron out some issues’

Abner Li | Mar 7 2021 - 8:59 pm PT

At the tail end of last year, the Fossil Group started rolling out the latest system for Google’s wearable platform. It’s been a slow process, with H MR2 currently paused for Fossil Gen 5 Wear OS watches to address unspecified issues.

While most Wear OS updates are delivered through the Play Store, Google back in September announced a performance boost for watches. H MR2 (as it’s officially called) speeds up app launch and boot times by up to 20%, while battery life has also been improved. It’s easier to manage watch modes and the pairing process is now faster.

Fossil started rolling out the update in December and owners have been receiving it until early February. At that point, no OTAs have appeared on devices when checking settings.

On February 26, a Fossil support account on Reddit confirmed that a pause was in effect:

My apologies for not being able to be as active on here as I would like. We are indeed holding the system updates for Gen 5 as we’re trying to iron out some issues. We’re getting closer to the release date now (though I cannot confirm here) and I’ll definitely let you know when it starts rolling out.
Thank you for your kind patience so far! Looking forward to bringing back the perks of Gen 5 to you soon.

Unspecified issues are behind Fossil temporarily pulling the H MR2 update for Wear OS. Fortunately, a release date is said to be coming soon, though that has yet to happen in the last 10 days.

Before last month, some did receive the update and no massive issues have been reported, so it’s unclear what bugs are in play. Fossil announced Gen 5 devices in August of 2019, with the line adding LTE this January.