Old Wear OS Trick Will Update Your Pixel Watch

The Pixel Watch is getting a December update alongside the Pixel line of phones and that likely means you’ve checked for it. Since these things tend to rollout slowly, you may have come away disappointed after doing so and seeing a “Your watch is up to date” message. Thankfully, an old trick from our Fossil days happens to work on the Pixel Watch when an update is available.

The year was 2019 and Fossil’s Wear OS watches were the best we could get. When new software would would start to arrive on them, we’d get excited, but as is always the case with Android updates, getting the newest software version sometimes took longer than we liked and that led folks into finding shortcuts or tricks to get them quicker. A trick was indeed discovered.

The trick involved heading into the system updates page on a watch and tapping the screen over and over for 30-60 seconds. For whatever reason, that constant tapping action forced the watch to reach out into the world of update servers and pull an update if it was available. And yes, it is working on the Pixel Watch.

Here’s how you can force the new December update onto your Pixel Watch:

• Swipe down the quick settings menu from the top of your watch and tap on the Settings icon
• Scroll all of the way to the bottom to “System”
• Tap on “System updates”
• If no update is available, start tapping towards the top of the screen on the watch icon
• Keep tapping. Keep tapping. Keeeeeep tapping.
• If an update is available, it should show up and start downloading
• Boom.

A big note: You don’t have to be on a charger or with any specific battery percentage in order to trigger this action – the action of forcing the update to be pulled or made available. However, you will need to have a high-enough battery percentage to download and install the update, so make sure you are at 60%+ or so or have your charger handy. This morning, when I explored this trick, I had 30% battery and it made me put it on a charger and charge up before it would install.

Go grab your update.