Google is continuing to improve its Wear OS platform, making it easier for users to have the information they need on their wrist. Now with Tiles, Google is making it even easier to swipe through the information on your wrist.
In recent months, Google has pushed out plenty of software updates that have greatly changed the user interface of Wear OS, making it more intuitive and easier to use. Now it is introducing Tiles. With Tiles, users are going to be able to swipe between Tiles that will show different things. One might show your flight information for your flight today, another may show what’s on your calendar, and another with Google Fit data. Instead of having a single long list of content, you can now use Tiles, which makes things even easier to navigate through.
To be clear, these are not replacing notifications, those will still be a scrolling list, but that scrolling list will get shorter thanks to the addition of Tiles. Now when you swipe left, you will be greeted with these Tiles. Google has Tiles for Goals (Google Fit), Next event, Weather Forecast, Heart Rate (Google Fit), Headlines and Timer.
Google is keeping these Tiles limited, so that you aren’t stuck with having hundreds of Tiles on your wrist. Which can be pretty tough to navigate through, especially on such a small display. Keeping it to six Tiles gives you the information you need, without having to worry about how much swiping you’ll need to do to get to this information.
This way, users will be able to keep up on things, like their Step goal, with ease. This is just the latest in a slew of updates that Google has been rolling out for Wear OS to make the platform easier to use, in an effort to get more people to use the platform. Wear OS has really struggled in the past few years, as we’ve seen fitness trackers and the Apple Watch really take a commanding lead over Wear OS. Google has also shown, at times, that it may not care about Wear OS any longer leading some to believe that it might be the next product that Google kills off – following Inbox, YouTube Gaming, Allo and a few others.
But given the many updates that Wear OS has pushed out in the past six to twelve months, it appears that it is all-in with Wear OS, thankfully. So that those that do use Wear OS smartwatches, can rest easy knowing that it’s not going to get axed anytime soon.
Tiles will be rolling out to Wear OS smartwatches over the next month. These updates may roll out slower on some smartwatches compared to others. This is because the manufacturer needs to roll out the update. Unfortunately on Wear OS, Google isn’t able to just push out this update to all smartwatches that are running on the platform. Google will also be showing off Tiles on Wear OS smartwatches at Google I/O next week, so if you’re attending the developer festival, it’s a great time to see what’s new with Wear OS.