Wear OS 5 will triple your battery life

Wear OS 5 is on the way, and with it, Google says Android smartwatch users should experience even better battery life. Running a marathon, for example, will reportedly consume 20% less battery than on Wear OS 4.

This emphasis on battery life is similar to last year’s Wear OS 4 announcement — and for good reason. Wear OS 4 helped the Pixel Watch 2 last a full day, something the original struggled to do. That longer battery life has apparently brought some goodwill. Google claims that last year, the Wear OS user base grew by an impressive 40% across 160 countries and regions.

Of course, we’ll probably have to wait until Samsung’s next-generation Galaxy Watch and Pixel Watch 3 this fall to see how this longer battery life translates to real-life use. Wear OS updates often reach new watches from Samsung and Google before they reach third-party or older hardware.

In addition to better battery life, Google also mentioned some improvements coming to watchfaces. The big problem is that Google is adding some more useful complications. This includes those that allow you to view goal progress, weather, and “weighted elements.” Weather complications include things like current conditions, temperature, UV index, and chance of precipitation. Meanwhile, the weighted elements appear to be a pie chart-like complication for multiple data sets – something you might expect from a health app where you track multiple goals in a day. Other updates were mainly to make things easier for developers, like providing new guidelines on how to build UI for larger, round screens. Easier ways to test fitness features such as auto-pause and resume workouts were also mentioned.

On the health front, Google’s Health Connect platform will also be getting some new tricks. For example, you may be able to extract data while a third-party application is running in the background. You will also be able to extract historical data beyond 30 days.

As for fitness features, Wear OS 5 is adding support for more advanced running metrics like ground contact time, stride length, vertical oscillation, and vertical ratio. These are pretty common metrics on multisport watches from Garmin and Polar, and Apple also added them in watchOS 9.

Much of this is something other smartwatch manufacturers have created for a while now. But while Google still has some catching up to do, it’s encouraging to see the gap steadily closing. Less encouraging is the fact that it appears Wear OS fragmentation continues. Last year, Google released Wear OS 4 before Wear OS 3 was fully rolled out to everyone except Samsung and Google. Apparently, we’re about to see the same thing happen with Wear OS 5. And while it would be nice if we could wait all Use OS Watch to get these updates in a timely manner, it’s a decent hint at what we might see in the Galaxy Watch 7 series and Pixel Watch 3.