Google Play Services 7.3 brings support for multiple Android Wear devices at once (Video)
Google has—finally—officially announced Google Play Services 7.3 (which first surfaced a couple of weeks ago), bringing several important new features to the company's Google-powered app support package.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes the loop on a release that had already leaked: Google Play Services 7.3 was spotted weeks before this official announcement, and its headline feature — pairing multiple Android Wear devices to one phone at once — turns the watch from a one-phone-one-watch accessory into something a user can run several of side by side. It lands mid-ramp for Google's wearable push: later in the same year, the company shipped Android Wear 1.4's wrist gestures and speaker support, and Play Services itself kept accelerating with the v7.8 rollout adding Mobile Vision face detection and barcode reading.
The long arc matters here too. Multi-device pairing in 2015 is an early brick in what became Google's devices-work-better-together program — the thirteen cross-device software features of 2022, including unlocking a phone from a watch, and eventually Wear OS 7 alongside Android 17. The 7.3 change is where the plumbing for 'one person, many wearables' first appeared.
First-order effects
- Users can now keep more than one Android Wear device paired and active against a single phone at the same time — no unpairing ritual between watches.
- Developers gain these capabilities through the Play Services layer rather than a full Android OS update, so supported features reach existing phones immediately instead of waiting on OEM upgrades.
Second-order effects
- Watch makers can target the same customer with multiple form factors — say a sport band and a dress model — knowing Google's pairing stack supports owning both, which pressures rivals whose ecosystems assume one accessory per phone.
- Because delivery runs through Play Services rather than Android builds, Google deepens its control over the Android experience on non-Google hardware, tightening dependence for OEMs that ship the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the durable structure is Google treating Play Services as the real update vehicle for Android capabilities — a mechanism that let it iterate toward the tightly integrated phone-plus-watch experiences of its later device lineup while sidestepping carrier and manufacturer upgrade cycles.
The trend: Google has spent a decade using Play Services as a fast-shipping capability layer, gradually converting Android from a phone OS into a coordinated multi-device ecosystem.