Android Wear smartwatches comes to iOS and iPhones

The day has finally come, and the potential Android Wear (operating system for Android smartwatches) customer base has now grown exponentially. Starting this week, Android Wear works on iOS, with all of the same features that Android users get. It has the Google Now cards, a few native applications, fitness tracking, and much more.

Supported iPhones (iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, 6, or 6 Plus running iOS 8.2+) will be able to access all of the same helpful information Android users see, with the exception to the vast array of custom watch faces found on Google Play. Google states there will be a curated set of 3rd-party faces that are usable, but for now, your choices seem somewhat limited.

There’s an important caveat, though: when paired to an iPhone, Android Wear watches can’t do as much as the Apple Watch. Nor can they do as much as they can when paired to an Android phone.

There are going to be probably half a dozen different Android Wear watches that will work with iPhones by the end of the year — if not more. Each of them looks different and, Google hopes, may appeal more to your personal style then the rounded capsule design of the Apple Watch

As for usable devices, the LG Watch Urbane is the only currently supported smartwatch, but all of the upcoming watches from Motorola, ASUS, and Huawei will be supported. So just to be clear, your current Moto 360, G Watch R, Gear Live, ZenWatch, or any other Android Wear smartwatch are not supported.

Assuming you have a compatible watch, the set-up process with Android Wear on an iPhone is easy. Install the Android Wear app, pair the watch to the phone, and tap through some screens to set up some basic preferences. After that, you’re basically done — though there are some deeper watch settings you can dig into.

Let’s just run down the feature set, though be warned that there are funny little details to know about with each of these bullet points.

• Your notifications from the iPhone are mirrored on Android Wear.
• You get Google Now cards on the watch.
• There are a bunch of different watch faces — including select third-party watch faces — that you can install and use.
• There are a few native apps on the watch you can tap into, like Weather or a clever Translate app.
• Voice search works, including various reminders that you might want to send to Google Now.
• You can do fitness tracking on the watch with Google Fit.
• You can get rich notifications from a small set of Google apps, such as Calendar and Gmail.

That’s quite a lot, actually, and much more than I expected Google to pull off. The problem is that there are restrictions in iOS that prevent certain things from working. It’s easy (and partially true) to rail against the locked-down nature of the iPhone, but in our conversations, everybody at Google demurred from wishing they could do more. Instead, Google just worked with the tools that Apple makes available over Bluetooth — and they turn out to be quite powerful.

And actually, there is apparently one restriction that Apple has backed off on: allowing apps to refer to Android in the first place. In the past, the powers-that-be in Apple’s App Store have rejected apps merely for noting they also exist on Android and even for declaring they support the Pebble smartwatch.

Apple also doesn’t allow competing app stores on the iPhone, nor is it likely that third-party app makers will be able to easily bake in more advanced support for Android Wear. That means that Google doesn’t (at least for now) offer third-party watch apps for iPhone users. It also means that the selection of third-party watch faces you can get are "curated" by Google and probably won’t offer the same advanced features you can get when you use Android Wear with an Android phone.

Even with all those limitations, Google has managed to make Android Wear feel very nearly feature-complete, at least by the standards of what most people use smartwatches for. Getting those ambient Google Now notifications is great, and I was weirdly pleased to be able to swipe away notifications on the watch and know the same was happening on the iPhone. If only Apple would make swipe-to-dismiss as easy on its phone. Like the Pebble, Android Wear only receives the notifications that you have set to appear on your lock screen.

Everything on Android Wear works thanks to the Android Wear app on the iPhone — you don’t need to install Google Search or any other Google apps to use it. Voice search on the watch works really well, though if you tap the button that opens your results on the phone, you run into a weird situation. Since it has to work with the Android Wear app, you end up in an in-app browser inside that app. It’s not terrible, just strange.

By speaking to your watch, you can set Google Now reminders, open the Weather app, set timers, and more. All of it is as good or better than Siri. You can also use the watch to control your music, but you can’t search for a specific song in Apple Music the way that Siri can.

The inability to communicate with other apps extends to other kinds of notifications, too. The most annoying is that you can’t reply to any incoming texts from your watch. You can reply to emails from Gmail, but everything else just shows you the incoming message. You have to pull out your phone even just to reply with a quick "Okay."

But Android Wear does manage to offer some advanced features with Google apps. If you use Google Calendar or Gmail, you’ll get more detailed notifications than you would with the default apps from Apple. And Google cleverly auto-blocks notifications from some duplicate apps when you set them up. In fact, you can swipe on any notification on your watch to get to "block app," which is a scary term for a nice feature: it stops notifications from that app from hitting your watch.

More importantly, you’ll likely be able to get a smartwatch for significantly less than the $349 asking price for the base model Apple Watch. We don’t yet know the prices for the forthcoming Huawei Watch, new Moto 360, or any of the other Android Wear watches due to arrive soon. But there’s going to be competition between those manufacturers, and that’ll drive the price down. Many Android Wear watches currently sell for as low as $149.

Asking somebody who’s not even sure that they want a watch — much less a smart one — to lay down upwards of $400 on a nascent platform is tough. Asking them to give it a shot for less than half that price is a different story. It’s a story Google will no doubt be telling constantly over the course of the holiday shopping season.

If you could not already guess, this is big for iPhone fans.

Android Wear app is now live on the Appstore. [LINK]