Galaxy Watch app breaks, not working on Google Pixel & Samsung devices

Ben Schoon | Jan 4 2024 - 9:15 am PT

An issue with Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app has broken Galaxy Watch support for many Google Pixel owners as well as some Samsung owners too.

Samsung runs all of its wearable accessories through the Galaxy Wearable app and has plugins for each device. If you have a Galaxy Watch 6, you’ll download that plugin, and if you’re pairing Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, you’ll download a different plugin. It’s a bit messy, but it generally gets the job done.

But, suddenly, those apps are broken for a lot Pixel users.

Several reports have surfaced via Reddit of Google Pixel owners finding that the Galaxy Wearable app is not working for Galaxy Watch devices following the January 2024 update that hit Pixels yesterday. Oddly, this only seems to affect Galaxy Watch devices, and not earbuds in the Wearable app. The issue affects all of Samsung’s Wear OS smartwatches – Galaxy Watch 4, Watch 5, and Watch 6.

Top comment by Glock3am

Liked by 19 people

Actually it's not an issue with the January update for the Pixel as it happened to me while on the December update. According to some comments on Reddit and Samsung support forums, it's an issue with the date changeover to 2024 and the app/plugin. As soon as it changed to January 1st, 2024 that bug happened and you can get everything working again by setting your phone back to a date in 2023 and then going in and enabling notifications again. You can then set the date back to the current day and it's good to go.

Or you can clear storage/cache in the app, uninstall the plugin and reset the phone and start from scratch and re-pair everything which is what I did, unfortunately prior to finding out the above!

At least the Smart Switch backup helped get things back almost like before minus some Play Store apps and faces.

View all comments

Not being able to access the app wouldn’t be a huge problem, but the real issue here is that this is leaving Galaxy Watch unable to stay connected to Google Pixel devices. Affected users report that their smartwatch says it is disconnected and unable to reconnect.

While the issue seems to have been triggered by the latest Google Pixel update, it seems more likely that a Samsung app update will fix the problem, as that’d be the fastest fix. Otherwise, users would be left waiting until February for a fix from Google.

Samsung and Google have yet to respond to the problem, though, so it’s unclear when a fix might arrive.

Notably too, it’s not just Pixel owners facing issues. In what may or may not be a separate issue – user reports are conflicting here – the Galaxy Wearable app is having problems on other devices, including Samsung’s own phones. The issue leaves the app either crashing or spinning infinitely, but some users report success in fixing it by rolling their phone’s date back to 2023 (which we don’t advise, as it’s a temporary fix anyway and has other ill effects). The two issues are very likely connected, but the problem appeared on Pixels immediately after the latest update arrived and seems to be reported far more by Pixel owners.