A long-awaited feature seems to have brought suffering for some unlucky users
Google Assistant has effectively made its debut on Wear OS 3 with the only two watches still that support it — Samsung’s Galaxy Watch4 and Watch4 Classic. Complaints have quickly flowed in about how always-on hotword detection has resulted in precipitous battery drain and that detection accuracy is pretty hit-or-miss. But if that wasn’t enough pain, we’ve been able to confirm a mission-critical bug that some users have been dealing with.
Redditors have voiced complaints across multiple threads about their watches disconnecting from their phones at some point after installing Assistant. Attempts to re-pair are unsuccessful since neither device seems to recognize the other.
“If I try to click add, it asks me to pair [the watch] like it is pairing to a new phone,” said u/SnooBeans6722, “and asks me to wipe my watch, which I don’t particularly want to do because it is a pain setting up all the cards on Samsung Pay again.”
Some users say they’ve had to perform a hard reset on their watches to get through the problem, which is especially unnerving for those without a backup to load.
Here is a list of threads we’ve found talking about this issue:
And if third-party reports aren’t enough for you, one of our editors even encountered his Watch4 coming unpaired from his phone.
We’ve reached out to Google and Samsung to see if they’re able to address the matter, though we’re not too hopeful for a timely response as it’s a long holiday weekend in the United States.
Using Google Assistant on Wear OS and Android Wear watches hasn’t exactly been the snappiest experience in the past, so it’s disappointing to also hear about performance issues plaguing the service here on the Galaxy Watch4 and Watch4 Classic. But for the people who have to deal with this issue on top of all the others, well, let’s just say it ain’t fun being them.
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