Xiaomi may plan to release a Wear OS 3 watch with full Play Store access in 2023, according to a recent report. After a promising but ultimately frustrating year for Wear OS fans, this news gives us new hope for better Android watches in 2023.
A 9to5Google (Opens in a new tab) The source claims that this watch will use the Xiaomi Watch brand and the Mi Fitness (Xiaomi Wear) Android app to sync data to and from your phone, and that it will arrive sometime this year but doesn’t have a hard timeline yet.
Xiaomi currently has two distinct groups of wearables: it’s developing its own Xiaomi Watch series with MIUI OS and outsourcing its more sporty bands to Huami, a Xiaomi-funded public company that also produces popular budget Amazfit trackers.
The Xiaomi Smart Band 7 Pro is among our favorite fitness trackers, but we’ve had little time with lifestyle watches from Xiaomi up to this point. With Wear OS 3, the brand could become even more attractive to Android fans.
This watch will never reach American shores; Huami wearables only tend to appear outside of Europe and Asia, and even premium phones like the Xiaomi 13 Pro never make it in the US. But we’re still very excited about what this news means for Wear OS and fitness smartwatches in general.
Wear OS needs a breath of fresh air
Since its launch in 2021, Wear OS 3 has been the Google/Samsung offering, and other brands are struggling to keep up.
It took Montblanc and Fossil over a year to adopt the update, and with that, it lost access to Google Assistant — which is currently only optimized for Exynos chips. Meanwhile, Mobvoi missed the 2022 deadline to update its old TicWatches and release the TicWatch Pro 5, and other Wear OS brands haven’t embraced it for as long as Suunto.
The US Android market has only a few heavy hitters, and until Motorola decides to rejoin the Wear OS ecosystem, consumers will have to choose between the Galaxy Watch 5, the Pixel Watch, and the many Fossil watches that greatly disappointed us. Fortunately, you have a couple of great options, but it’s not enough for a proper “ecosystem” to compete with Apple’s market hold.
In Europe and Asia, consumers have a wealth of Android options. But with Xiaomi, OPPO, OnePlus, Honor, and other Chinese brands largely sticking to their own operating systems for their wearables, many Android users will see Wear OS 3 as a niche service that isn’t worth investing time in.
The Xiaomi Wear OS watch could be a sign of things to come, as Google has successfully brought its Android partners into the fold with the promise of a synced phone watch experience and a customizable user interface to match. Consumers will then have more (and better) Wear OS watches to choose from, which will push each brand to iterate and compete with each other even tougher.
Xiaomi’s focus on fitness will only help Wear OS
Realizing that Xiaomi watches and Xiaomi trackers made by Huami are not the same, both sides of this brand place a heavy emphasis on fitness, whether with the Mi Fitness or Zepp Health apps.
It’s one of the rare brands to offer dual-frequency GPS, which is the next step in more accurate location tracking. I’m sad, Xiaomi dropped Firstbeat analytics — the team behind Garmin watches’ powerful exercise data — after the older Mi Watch. Despite this, it still has hundreds of sports modes (many with unique real-time stats) and aims to include the sensors needed for more accurate tracking.
Best of all, its watches and trackers always tend to prioritize battery life above all else, and they usually last more than a week with heavy use. that probably It won’t last with battery-guzzling Wear OS 3, but we can hope for something like the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro that lasts for days — hopefully in a more compact form factor.
While this default Xiaomi Wear OS watch won’t sell in every region, it could prompt Samsung — which has fiddled with Samsung Health since the launch of the Active 2 in 2019 — to make a more concerted effort. It will give Wear OS users an alternative to Fitbit’s paid Pixel Watch subscription and Fossil’s simple wellness app, too.
As for Xiaomi itself, our main complaint with devices like the Xiaomi Mi Band 7 has been its intelligence: it lacks actionable notifications, an assistant, or third-party app support. This partnership with Wear OS brings the most diverse interactivity and software to a series known for sleek designs and solid hardware. Ideally, it would fit into a watch that Google and Samsung are pushing harder in the fitness arena and making US users of the operating system jealous.