Loading apps to Wear OS from outside of Google Play will be more difficult starting in March

There are several ways to install apps on a Wear OS smartwatch: from its miniature Play Store, copying the Wear OS version of apps you have on your mobile or through ADB. The second will no longer be available as of March 10.

After limiting the visibility of Wear OS applications that run alongside other mobile applications, the next step will be to they cannot be installed from Apps on my phone, a relatively convenient way that existed to install apps for Wear OS that are not in Google Play.

No more Wear OS version apps inside

To make it easier to discover and install apps on the Wear OS smartwatch, developers can include the Wear OS version within your Android app. This way, you don’t need to download anything else to your watch, except “transfer” the Wear OS version of the app from your phone to your watch.

This behavior is “obsolete” since Wear OS is able to download and install applications directly, although Google has allowed it until now as a legacy mode. Google prefers that download the applications directly from Google Play on the smartwatch And, therefore, these Wear OS apps within Android apps have limited visibility: they don’t appear in searches on Google Play.

The only way to install these applications was to go to the section of Apps on my phone, but this will also change from March 10, as the company has made known to the developers of applications for Wear OS in an e-mail.

This is precisely the installation mode that some Wear OS applications that are not available on Google Play have, and that without forgetting that it is also faster than using the store itself. Google suggests to developers that, instead of embedding the Wear OS version in the mobile version -which increases the size of the APK that users install even if they don’t have Wear OS- use a multi-APK system.

In this way, the application will appear when searching for it in Google Play on the smartwatch

, and users who download it on their mobile will not need to take Wear OS as a gift. What is not clear is whether Apps on my phone it will cease to exist or will simply change to show you these apps with multiple APKs, which you should in any case download from the store, as they are no longer physically on the mobile.

Via | Android Police

–
The news

Loading apps to Wear OS from outside of Google Play will be more difficult starting in March

was originally published in

Xataka Android

for
Ivan Ramirez

.