Google is trying to promote Wear OS 3 which is being used to drive the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. One of the ways that Google is promoting Wear OS is by listing “essential” watch apps for your Wear OS 3 powered timepiece. A Reddit subscriber with the handle of u/mannabhai posted a screenshot of this page and it showed that the list of “essential” watch apps for your Wear OS 3 watch include titles like Google Fit, Google Keep, Google Pay, Google Maps, Uber, Citymapper and Podcast.
What makes this interesting is that two of these “essential” watch apps are no longer available on the watch play store. For example, the Wear OS version of Uber had been 86’d a long time ago. Telegram, on the other hand, only recently lost Wear OS support. So while those two apps are considered “essential” by Google for Wear OS 3-powered timepieces, good luck trying to install them on your Wear OS watch.
Two Wear OS 3 apps listed as Essential by Google are not available on the platform
The other apps on the page are good to go and can be downloaded on your Wear OS 3 watch. Whether you consider them essential is up to you. Some Reddit users who were chiming in on the screenshot had good things to say about Telegram with one calling it the best messaging app.
The definition of “essential” is something that is necessary and extremely important. The real issue here is how could Google consider an app to be essential for Wear OS 3 users if it isn’t even available on the platform.
