[Wear OS General] TheMystic:
Hello community!

In this post, I am giving you info on some aspects of Wear OS, which you may or may not know. All the details presented are based on my experience with Samsung Galaxy Watch4 (WiFi model), running on Wear OS 3.x. So they may not be representative of all the watches (and those that run on custom software like Tizen) in the market.

Let's begin:

01. You can sideload phone apps on the Watch using ADB. There are good tutorials on the internet that explain how to go about it. If the UI on the app is difficult to use, you may be able to make it usable by reducing the DPI of your watch. Again, there are good tutorials available for this on the internet. It is advisable that you restore the DPI to its default values after setting up the apps to prevent unexpected behaviour or other problems.

02. There is no support for VPN service on Wear OS. So you can't run Android Firewall apps like Netguard, Karma Firewall, etc.

03. There is no App Info page in the watch for installed apps. This means you can't delete cache or data for apps. You can only install or uninstall apps, just like in iOS. However, the app info page is available on the Galaxy Wear app (for Samsung Galaxy Watch) that will show the storage used, battery consumed, memory occupied for each app. It will also allow for force stopping and uninstalling apps on the watch from this screen.

04. You can backup your watch faces and other apps installed from Play Store (or other official stores like Galaxy Store) using an Android File Manager that supports APK backups. There is no built-in support for this though.

05. As with Android, there is NO support for backing up app data, or the configurations of watch faces. The built-in backup feature is very limited in what it does, so don't expect that you'll be able to simply restore everything after a factory reset. This is one area where iOS and WatchOS are clear winners.

06. If you reset the network settings on your phone, you'll have to factory reset your watch to pair it with your phone again. Apparently, this is for security (of your data) purposes.

07. If you are using a Samsung Galaxy watch running on Wear OS, then the Galaxy Watch Manager app on your phone is very crucial, and holds your watch's pairing key. If you delete this app's data on your phone or uninstall it, you'll have to factory reset your watch to pair it with your phone again.

08. Your watch can actually play videos, stream media, act like a FTP server, and do a few more things if you install (sideload) the right apps. I wouldn't recommend doing that regularly because the watch hardware is not designed to do these things, so you'll really be pushing the hardware if you use your watch for such activities for extended periods.

09. Unlike your phone, the displays used on smartwatches are prone to screen burn-in, especially because most of the watch faces do not offer a proper AOD feature that minimizes this risk. So choosing the right watch face is very important. Alternatively, keep changing the watch face every day or so.

10. AOD works only when you are wearing your watch. This is a good thing because it not only preserves battery, but also helps reduce screen burn-in.

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