Android Wear 2.0 review: new capabilities, such as Android Pay and installing apps locally, make devices more useful, but bugs can spoil the experience
Are Android Wear 2.0 and two new watches from LG enough to get you to care about smartwatches? — Are you wearing a smartwatch? Not likely.
Context & Ripple Effects
This review lands at the end of a long runway: after the Huawei Watch showed how far good hardware could be dragged down by Android Wear's limits, Google rebuilt the platform around a redesigned interface and third-party complications, then delayed the 2.0 release into early 2017 while adding an on-watch Play Store to the developer preview. What ships today is that delayed version, running first on two new LG watches.
The headline capabilities — Android Pay and installing apps directly on the watch rather than sideloading from a phone — are the ones the earlier hands-on coverage implied were coming, and they change what a Wear device fundamentally is: less a phone accessory, more a standalone small-screen computer. The catch, per this and yesterday's companion review, is that bugs still spoil the experience.
First-order effects
- LG's two new watches become the de facto reference hardware for Android Wear 2.0, so every bug the reviewers flag lands on LG's launch as much as on Google's platform release.
- Buyers who do adopt get genuine new utility — payments from the wrist and locally installed apps — but the buggy experience gives fence-sitters a concrete reason to keep not wearing a smartwatch, reinforcing the low adoption the review itself notes.
Second-order effects
- Watchmakers like Huawei, previously differentiated mainly despite the software, now compete on a platform whose core constraints are lifted — shifting their burden toward battery life and design while exposing them to Google's pace of fixes.
- Vendors reading the same reviews have a clearer case for going their own way: Samsung's later Galaxy Watch Active 2, with its heavy reliance on Samsung apps and Bixby, shows the fork away from Google's stack that a shaky Wear 2.0 launch invites.
Third-order effects
- Google's follow-up move of delivering new Wear features through the Play Store rather than full OS updates points to a structure where the watch platform iterates continuously and vendor lock-in, not OS capability, becomes the main axis of competition.
- If standalone apps and payments mature while reliability lags, the smartwatch market consolidates into two camps — Google-services wearables and vertically locked alternatives — with hardware makers forced to pick a side.
The trend: Smartwatches are evolving from tethered phone accessories into standalone platforms, and the quality of Google's software cadence will decide whether vendors stay in its orbit or fork into their own stacks.