Original Pixel Watch Will Get Wear OS 4 Update “Later This Year”

There’s a chance you watched the Pixel Watch 2 unveiling yesterday and said, “Cool, I’ll stick with my original Pixel Watch.” And that’s fine! We don’t all need to upgrade to the shiny new things whenever the shiny new things show up. But if you did decide to pass on the new Pixel Watch 2, you might be wondering when your own Pixel Watch will see the software from Google’s new watch. The answer isn’t that clear.

The new Pixel Watch 2 runs Wear OS 4 out of the box just like Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch 6 watches. Samsung has also recently released Wear OS 4 updates to its older Watch 5 and Watch 4 lines, yet Google’s original Pixel Watch is still on the older Wear OS 3. Why is that? Well, we don’t know.

Yesterday, as a part of the Pixel Watch 2’s unveiling, Google released a blog post on the Android Developers Blog titled “Wear OS 4 is now stable and available on Google Pixel Watch 2!” That’s a weird way to frame it, right? Wear OS 4 has been out in the wild on Samsung watches since at least August, with others getting updates to it in recent weeks. Does that mean Samsung has shipped a beta Wear OS 4 build or what are we saying here?

I’ll try to avoid going down that hole and instead focus on things being stable! So with Wear OS 4 being “stable,” that should hopefully mean it is ready for the original Pixel Watch at any moment. In that blog post from above, Google vaguely addresses what that timeline should be for the original Pixel Watch by saying the following:

“Later this year, Pixel Watches will receive a system update to Wear OS 4, further expanding the set of users who can enjoy your app’s capabilities on the latest software.”

So that’s what we know. The original Pixel Watch should get Wear OS 4 “later this year.” I wish I could tell you more, but it’s really all we know.