Early look at multiple design changes in Wear OS 4

Google introduced the Material You Design Language with the release of Android 12 in 2021. However, Material You’s key feature, dynamic themes, is not available on all Android platforms. For example, Google’s Wear OS operating system for smart watches does not theme its UI or apps based on the current watch face. The latest version of Wear OS is based on Android 13, so the platform is should Supports dynamic themes. And we’ve seen hints in the past that it’s in development.

But now it looks like we’re getting closer to general availability of supported materials in Wear OS 4. Additionally, Google may add another much-requested design change to the Pixel Watch: the app grid.

As you can see on the right side of the video clip above, the Pixel Watch 2’s app drawer is now a grid view of installed apps. Typically, the Pixel Watch 2’s app drawer is a simple one-column list view that scrolls vertically through all your apps, as seen on the left side of the clip. Depending on how many apps you have installed, it may take some time to scroll through the list to find the one you want to launch.

However, the new three-column grid view will significantly reduce the amount of time you spend scrolling through the app. The only downside to the new grid view app drawer is that it doesn’t display the text name of each app. This means you need to identify your app by its icon alone. This probably won’t be an issue for most people, as you’ll likely install far fewer apps on your smartwatch than on your phone, but it’s worth considering.

If you don’t like the new grid view, it looks like you can return to list view by: Settings > General > App View. Note that this menu is currently not accessible on Pixel Watch 2, as the Grid View app drawer feature has not been rolled out yet. To get these images, I had to manually enable this feature. Fortunately, this feature appears to be working perfectly on both the original Pixel Watch and the latest Wear OS version of the Pixel Watch 2, so it’s only a matter of time before it rolls out.

Material You’s support for dynamic themes is another feature that looks almost ready. After manually enabling this feature, a new “Watch Faces and Styles” menu appeared under “Settings.” This menu provides shortcuts to change your watch face or system theme.

The system theme can be changed to match the current watch face (i.e. dynamic theme) or a preset theme. Here is the list of preset themes:

There aren’t many apps or places within the OS that support the Material You theme at this time, but here’s an example of how the brightness menu changes depending on the current theme.

Google is currently working on the next version of Wear OS, which is expected to be Wear OS 5 based on Android 14, but you won’t have to wait too long to get these features. That’s because both of these features are already present in current Wear OS 4 builds for Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2, and will be released soon, most likely in the Pixel Feature Drop scheduled for March 2024. must. The materials you support must be part of the Wear OS platform. This means it will also be available on other smartwatches that update to the latest build of Wear OS 4 distributed by Google.

On the other hand, the grid view app launcher is part of the Wear OS launcher that OEMs are expected to customize, so this implementation could be exclusive to the Pixel Watch family. Luckily, other OEMs like Samsung already offer grid view app launchers on their smartwatches, so the Pixel Watch is actually the only one that doesn’t have this UI in its app drawer.

Stay tuned for coverage of upcoming Wear OS and Pixel Watch updates to find out when these features will be released.