Google today announced new features for Wear OS 6 at Google I/O 2025, offering the operating system a design makeover using Material 3 Expressive, a design language announced by the company earlier this month.
Google released a developer preview for Wear OS 6 based on Android 16 for testing on Tuesday.
With Wear OS 6, app tiles adopt the default system font, as Google is trying to make your apps look more cohesive. Additionally, the Dynamic Themes Library adjusts the color of your app or tile to match the color scheme of your pixel clock face.
The core promise of the new design reference platform is to enable developers to build better customizations in their apps along with seamless migrations. The company has released design guidelines for developers along with the Figma design files.
Additionally, Google is releasing Wear Compose Material 3 and a brand new Wear Protolayout library for developers with expanded color schemes, typography, and shapes for apps with more dynamic appearances.
Image credit: Google
To match the circular look of the Wear OS 6 Watch, Google is introducing a three-slot tile layout with title slots, main content slots, and bottom slots that make it look consistent across screens of different sizes.
The company also adds newly designed components such as buttons, progress indicators and scroll indicators to make it suitable for circular clock displays. Developers can view components that collapse to scroll in a variety of ways. For example, components can be shrinked when close to the top or bottom of the clock screen.
Image credit: Google
WEAR OS 6 adds a way to change the appearance of the watch's face through animated state transitions, from ambient to interactive to interactive and photo watch faces. Additionally, there are new APIs to build the watch market.
Image credit: Google
Google is starting with Pixel Watches on Wear OS 5.1 and adding a qualification manager API to add the OS to WEAR OS. Wearing OS 5.1 on the Pixel also gives users rich media controls that allow users to fast-forward or rewind podcasts. Additionally, compatible apps also get new menus of playlists and controls, such as shuffling, likes, and repeating.