Millions of smartwatches running Wear OS 2 will lose a convenient and important feature

Smart watches running on the Wear OS 2 operating system will soon not have support for the Google Assistant voice assistant, the 9to5google portal reports.

A line was found in the code of the Wear OS by Google mobile application used to synchronize the smartphone with the watch, which informs about the termination of support for this service.

“Google Assistant support on this watch will end soon. Please upgrade your watch to a newer version that supports Google Assistant and runs Wear OS 3 or a later version," reads the above-mentioned line in the code.

If a smartwatch loses its voice assistant, it could mean that users can no longer use it to set a timer, set alarms and reminders, control their smart home and ask about the weather, among other functions.

There are currently millions of smartwatches running Wear OS 2, most of which were released in 2020 and 2021.

Current versions of the operating system are Wear OS 3, 3.5 and 4, which are based on Android 11 and 13, while all versions of Wear OS 2 are built on Android 8 and based on Android 9.