Google is opening up Tiles feature in wearOS to third-party developers

It is worth mentioning that this is one of the biggest steps taken by Google to improve the operating system for smartwatches.

The Fossil Gen 5E is powered with Wear OS by Google and can be used with your Android smartwatches as well as Apple ones.  (Jhinuk Sen/HT Tech)

Google today announced that it is improving its wearOS platform by letting third-party developers create custom Tiles for the platform. For those unaware, Google introduced Tiles feature back in 2019, wherein users could glance at a piece of information and could swipe among them to get details on weather, calendar notifications, or stats like heart rate. Until now, all these Tiles used to come directly from Google or the devices manufacturer. However, with Jetpack Tiles Library for third-party developers, we can see some custom new Tiles for the OS.

“Today, we're excited to announce that the Jetpack Tiles library is in alpha. This library enables developers to create custom Tiles on Wear OS smartwatches. These custom Tiles will become available to users later this Spring when we roll out the corresponding Wear OS platform update,” said Jolanda Verhoef, Developer Relations Engineer in the blog post.

It is worth mentioning that this is one of the biggest steps taken by Google to improve the operating system for smartwatches. If you are a wearOS user, you may have realized that the company was not giving enough focus on this platform until recently.

However, with custom Tiles coming to users later this spring, it seems like the work on the platform is back on track.

Talking about wearOS, Fossil has reportedly stopped H MR2 update for Gen 5 wearOS smartwatches.

According to reports, the update was paused to address some unspecified issues. As revealed by Google back in September, the H MR2 update reportedly speeds up the app launch along with the boot times by up to 20%. Also mentioned is that the battery performance has been improved with the update. What more is that the update will make it easier for you to manage watch mode and the pairing process will be faster.

In a separate report, it has been mentioned that Samsung might be the newest player in the smartwatch segment to come with a wearOS device. Although there is nothing confirmed, some kernel source codes have hinted that Samsung might be working on a wearOS smartwatch, which if true, will also be the company's first. Until now it has been launching smartwatches with Tizen OS.