Does Google Remember Wear OS?

Jules Wang, writing for Android Police, “Wear OS Will Lose Google Play Music Months Before a YouTube Music App Exists”:

Google Play Music is being phased out in favor of YouTube Music starting next month. That change already exacerbates the need for the latter to achieve a desirable feature parity with its predecessor, but it also now presents a challenging chasm for Wear OS users who will lose access to Play Music without a robust YouTube Music experience.

A new Wear OS help page tells users that they won’t be able to download or even use Google Play Music “in the next couple of weeks.” And until a proper YouTube Music experience appears “in the coming months,” that means they’ll have to resort to other apps in order to download and play local files.

Remember my theory that Google has grown bored with Android and doesn’t really care about it? That’s me talking about phones, which, in general, Google does care about insofar as they know that billions of people spend hours per day every day using them. With wearables Google never even cared in the first place, except for making goofy demo concepts like Google Glass. The customers who bought Wear OS devices care about them; the company that designed them clearly does not. If they cared, how could it be that you can’t listen to Google’s music platform on Google’s wearable platform?

Is Apple Watch a new and exciting product in 2020? No. It’s now mature and established. But Apple is as invested in it as ever, working as hard as ever on the software and — I’ll bet we’ll see in a month or two — the hardware.

I thought things were bad in the PC era when the choice was between just two major platforms, only one of which (the Mac) was designed with any taste. But at least Windows was (and remains) made by a company that, however lacking in taste, cares deeply about the platform and is invested in its success. Android is like Windows except Google isn’t even all that invested in it, and when it comes to Android running on anything other than a phone, they clearly don’t even care.

This sucks as someone who cares about the Apple ecosystem, because there’s no competitive pressure on Apple at all for anything other than phones. When is the last time anyone credibly pointed to a Wear OS watch and said “Boy, there’s a product that actually gives Apple Watch a run for its money”?

★ Wednesday, 5 August 2020