I Just Want to Pair Multiple Phones to My Wear OS Watch

There may be a perfectly technical reason for this, but it’s 2018 and I still can’t pair my Wear OS watches to more than one phone at a time. At this point, almost every person I know carries both a work and personal phone, yet connecting a watch to one and then the other, so that you are always attached to the phone in your pocket, is not possible.

For those not onto Wear OS still to this day, what I’m telling you is that you can’t pair the same watch to two different phones. Look at that image above from Google’s own support page that I just visited this morning.

So if I have a Galaxy S9 as my personal phone and a LG V40 (lol no one owns that) Pixel 3 as my work phone, I can pair a Fossil Sport (review) to my personal S9 only. If the battery on my S9 dies or I chuck it in a drawer during work hours, grabbing only my work phone to head out to appointments or sales calls or to get me through the day, my watch is now no longer connected to a phone. I can’t just switch the Bluetooth connection over to my Pixel 3 from my Galaxy S9. How dumb is that?

Again, I don’t know the exact reasoning behind this decision, but it has been there since day 1 for Android Wear and now Wear OS. I keep hoping that with every new Wear OS version, Google will change this, yet here we are. I’d imagine Google could make the OS smart enough to reserve two connections in it, allowing you to choose a phone to attach to. I can’t imagine it’s a Qualcomm chipset problem, but it could be, since Qualcomm makes sh*t wearable chips that are almost older than the platform they serve.

And look, I don’t need the watch actively paired to two. That would be bad news, since again, the chipsets involved here might melt your watch. All I’m asking for is the ability to disconnect the watch from one phone and then attach it to another by clicking a couple of buttons. You know how you have to do that today? You have to fully factory reset your watch to then connect it to another phone. Have you ever factory reset a Wear OS watch? Good lord, it’s painful. Because they all run old-as-f*ck chipsets from Qualcomm, a company who wants to invest nothing in Google’s wearable platform because Google doesn’t seem interested in looking elsewhere for its chips, it takes a good 30 minutes to setup a watch. Not only that, but during setup, you are lucky if you get out of it without burning through 50% of the watch’s battery.

Google, come on, man, help me us out here.