Android Wear v1.3 update includes new watch faces “Interactive” and “Together”, which allows users to pair watches, share updates, pictures and activities
Cody Toombs / Android Police :
Context & Ripple Effects
This v1.3 release delivers on the gestures, WiFi and UI overhaul Android Wear promised back in April — but the headline addition is social: the "Together" face lets two users pair watches and pass updates, pictures and activities straight between wrists. It marks Google treating the watch face itself as an application surface rather than a cosmetic layer.
That matters because the watch face was exactly where rival Pebble had been pushing — its upcoming 2.3 firmware brought actionable Android Wear-style notifications to Pebble's own platform. With v1.3, Google answers on the same turf, using the face layer to add pairing and sharing that hardware-agnostic rivals can't easily match inside their own ecosystems.
First-order effects
- Owners who install v1.3 can pair two watches via the Together face and share updates, pictures and activities device-to-device, turning a previously passive display into an interactive surface.
- Watch-face designers now have a new interaction model — "Interactive" faces — meaning faces stop being wallpaper and start functioning as launch points for actions.
Second-order effects
- Pebble's differentiation around notification and glanceable interactions gets squeezed, since Google is absorbing pairing and sharing natively into Wear's face layer.
- Developers building for Wear gain an incentive to ship functionality as watch faces rather than standalone apps, shifting where third-party effort and discovery concentrate.
Third-order effects
- If pairing-as-a-feature holds, it prefigures Google's later cross-device strategy — the 2022 rollout of 13 features explicitly built to make Google devices work better together, from expanded Fast Pair to unlocking an Android phone with a watch — where device-to-device linkage becomes an OS-level selling point rather than a per-app trick.
The trend: Smartwatch platforms are evolving from standalone notification displays toward paired, multi-device ecosystems, with the software layer — not the hardware — becoming the differentiator.