All messaging services should offer Wear OS apps

Abner Li | Aug 1 2023 - 12:11 pm PT

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Ever since getting the Pixel Watch last year and wearing it full time (after previously using a Fitbit fitness tracker), one common task I frequently accomplish on my wrist is messaging.

It’s not just replying to incoming notifications but opening the Google Messages app, scrolling to a conversation, and sending a new chat. All of this requires a full app – the ability to see new alerts from your phone is not enough. Being able to read through a full exchange on a watch is surprisingly useful at times. It’s not better than having the full keyboard on your phone to type, but being able to send something via either speech-to-text or Gboard is highly convenient.

As a Wear OS chat app, Google Messages offers the most basic of experiences. The current gold standard is WhatsApp. The app’s UI is quite basic, with not much customization to be done, but where it excels is how it offers Wear OS Tiles that show frequent text and voice message conversations, which are notably supported. There’s also a handy complication that gives an unread count and doubles as a way to quickly open the app from a watch face. (In comparison, I just have the Google Messages app icon acting as a shortcut.)

Modern Wear OS apps going forward would offer similar functionality, with Google Messages dating back to 2021. Android’s RCS/SMS client needs a full revamp sooner than later, with WhatsApp proving how you can fit in richer capabilities like voice memos just fine.

Looking at the first-party front, Google Voice should really have a Wear OS app. Google can ignore the calling and voicemail (though reading voice transcripts on your wrist might be nice) aspects of the service and just offer texting functionality. Then there’s Google Chat, which looks to be getting a mobile homescreen redesign later this year. As part of that, Google should add an on-wrist component.

The challenge there – as well as for a hypothetical Slack Wear OS app – would be how richer Channels and Spaces are handled, given inline and emoji replies. Even then, I wouldn’t mind if all I got was 1:1 and group chats and maybe the ability to reply to mentions. Gmail, Chat, and Voice are all Google Workspace apps. With Gmail about to release a Wear OS client this fall, the other two should follow.

Other apps that should get on board include Facebook Messenger, Signal, and Telegram. I’d argue that Instagram (and Twitter DMs in the past) would greatly benefit from having Wear OS apps that just focus on messaging while ignoring the other social network aspects.