Wear OS smartwatches are tipped to upgrade to the use of cloud back-ups in the future

Google touts its Wear OS as "your world on your wrist" - however, (until very recently) it has been a world in which a given smartwatch is capable of considerably less than its paired smartphone. The UI has, for example, a habit of being unable to create the user data backups one might expect of Android by default.

However, the XDA contributor Pranob Mehrotra claims to have discovered that Google has finally come up with a solution to this problem at last. The blog has been digging through the code of the very latest Play Services beta update (v22.32.12) for the most cutting-edge of developments for the Mountain View giant's ecosystem, as it does, and found something potentially beneficial to Wear OS on this occasion.

It largely relates to the new string companion_backup_opt_in_title, which apparently causes a prompt to "Back up your device with Google One" to appear on a wearable's screen. The code may then lead to other strings that allow the user to choose the account with the cloud in which this back-up will be stored.

These files will then come into play when the same wearable detects a new "companion" (a freshly unboxed smartphone during its initial set-up, for example). It will then be able to 'stream' the back-up in order to connect to it and behave just as it did with the former companion - all without a single screen obliging a reset of any kind.

Not only would this bring Wear OS more in line with the demands of everyday, every-consumer use, it would improve a wearable's versatility and functionality with this kind of internal storage-independent back-up facility.

Then again, there is no indication of when this feature, apparently to be called Backup by Google One, will hit its targets, or which versions of Wear OS will be eligible for it.

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