Mobvoi Wants You to Know That It is Still Working on Wear OS 3 Updates

There was a time in the world of Wear OS where all we could think about was when devices not made by Samsung would receive the significant upgrade to Wear OS 3. Our main focus for a good chunk of last year was targeted at Fossil, because they were arguably for the longest time the biggest name in the game and really the only one making Wear OS watches. And then their Fossil Gen 6 line received Wear OS 3, they followed that up by updating other brand watches of theirs, and all was good.

This post, as you can tell by the title, is not about Fossil. Fossil pushed updates to Wear OS 3 as far back as October of 2022. Instead, this is about Mobvoi and their horrendous support for their own watches that were promised an update to Wear OS 3 and still have not received it in May of 2023.

To backup for a second, keep in mind that Google first announced Wear OS 3 in May of 2021 as some sort of partnership with Samsung to re-launch the platform. Samsung then shipped Wear OS 3 on its Galaxy Watch 4 line in its return to Google’s wearable platform and then held onto what we believe was an exclusive on the OS for a year. We think that because Google told all of its partners that they wouldn’t be able to ship Wear OS 3 on their own watches until well into 2022 at the earliest.

Fast forward and we’re back to talking about Mobvoi. You see, Mobvoi has three watches that they were going to bring Wear OS 3 to – the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra, TicWatch Pro 3, and TicWatch E3. Google acknowledged them in July of 2021 as capable, yet here we are.

Today, the company released a statement on Twitter to “sincerely acknowledge your concerns and understand that you may be disappointed” by the fact that your watch has not received its promised upgrade to Wear OS 3. They went on to apologize and confirm that the update is indeed still in the works for all of those watches. The statement also mentions that these watches run the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 and uses a proprietary dual system architecture that has apparently added to the length of time to finish this important update. That seems a bit like some blame being put on Qualcomm, but they don’t fully go there.

From there, the statement says that they plan to open an “extensive closed beta” test “soon” for their Wear OS 3-capable watches and that they will announce how you might be able to participate. So again, it is May 2023 and Mobvoi is just getting to a closed beta test for Wear OS 3, an update that Google said everyone could ship in the second half of 2022, which Fossil did. Keep in mind that the new Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 should be here at any moment and we assume it’ll already have Wear OS 3.

Sheesh.