Meta has announced the availability of its standalone WhatsApp app for Wear OS 3 smartwatches. The app was teased at the Google IO 2023 event in May 2023. Now, a couple of months after the beta testing, the standalone WhatsApp Wear OS app is finally available for download on the Google Play Store for Wear OS 3 and above watches.
As reported by Techcrunch, the WhatsApp Wear OS app is now widely rolling out to all smartwatch users running on Wear OS 3 and up. The list of devices includes the latest Google Pixel Watch, Galaxy Watch series, Fossil smartwatches, and a few watches from Mobvoi (Ticwatch series). The app will not be made available for Wear OS 2 and legacy watches.
Once the app is installed on the smartwatch, users will be able to start new conversations, respond to text messages and even take calls all of these without even being connected to the phone. Let’s take a look at more details of the Wear OS WhatsApp application.
WhatsApp Standalone App for Wear OS
While WhatsApp supported Wear OS for the past few years, it was only showing notifications from the phone and mirroring all the messages and media (images) from the phone’s notification. In addition to this, the Wear OS platform also allowed users to respond to the messages. However, with the new standalone application for Wear OS, users with Wear OS 3 can install the app, register and start new a conversation, respond to texts, and even make calls.
Mark Zuckerberg just announced that you can now WhatsApp from your wrist with the new WhatsApp for Wear OS app. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/rtuHHSFEUW
— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) July 19, 2023
In addition, the app will also allow users to interact with emojis and there is also support for quick replies 一 all these can be done straight from the watch without being dependent on the smartphone (with LTE version watches). Users who install the app will be able to see all the group chats as well as individual chats on the watch’s screen. As you can see from the above tweet, Wear OS users will also be able to listen (and send) audio messages directly from the watch, which was not available previously.
Interestingly, the native WhatsApp is not available on Apple’s Watch OS platform yet, which gives Wear OS an advantage over its rival. Google has been putting more effort into bringing back Wear OS to mainstream and at the Google IO this year, the company several new announcements around the Wear OS platform including the beta version of WhatsApp, the Google Home app, Gmail, and much more.
