Wear OS will get offline Google Maps and a revamped Play Store later this year

Google will significantly improve Wear OS in the coming months. Google has announced that it will roll out improvements for the Google Play Store on the smartwatch, as well as offline Google Maps maps.

Wear OS gets improvements

Wear OS, formerly Android Wear, had its heyday, but that eventually ended up in a bit of a dip. Now that Samsung decided last year to no longer supply the Galaxy Watch 4 family with its own Tizen OS, but with Wear OS, the platform has been given a bit of a new lease of life. It can be said that this first step has been successful. According to the manufacturer, the Galaxy Watch 4 has ensured that there are three times as many active Wear OS watches on the market. With the Galaxy Watch 5 family announced on Wednesday, the manufacturer wants to continue this success. The smartwatches come with Wear OS 3.5, along with One UI 4.1.

Google has announced that Google Maps for Wear OS will receive support for offline navigation. At the moment you still need to have a connection with your smartphone, but that will no longer be necessary in the future and you can, for example, leave the phone at home. In addition, Google promises that a new Google Play Store will come to the smartwatch. It should be more similar to those on the smartphone, and new collections will also be offered, along with trending apps and personalized recommendations. Below you can see a preview. An exact date has not been mentioned, but according to Google it is “later this year”.

Finally, Samsung has announced that new Wear OS apps will be offered for music lovers. These are SoundCloud and Deezer.