While Facebook owner Meta is in the process of scrapping the Facebook Messenger app for Apple Watch, Meta is bringing one of its other messaging services to another smartwatch platform: WhatsApp is coming to the best smartwatches running Wear OS. The official app is currently in beta and should roll out to everybody in the summer.
There are a few things the app can't currently do, though. You can't start a new chat or remove an existing one, and you can't make voice or video calls or answer them. If you want to change your profile details you'll need to do that on your phone, and the same applies if you want to view your call history.
The app currently works on devices including the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 and the Pixel Watch too.
Is the WhatsApp wear OS app worth having?
I think it is. At the moment you're limited to receiving notifications from the phone app on your smartwatch, which you can't interact with; essentially each notification is telling you to pick up your phone.
With this app you can do a lot more. You can reply using text or with your voice, and you can browse through recent chats and your message history. There's also a watch face complication that can tell you how many unread messages you have.
The downside to all of this is that if your WhatsApp is anything like mine, it's potentially a constant distraction: the groups I'm in are fairly small compared to other people's but even then they often burst into frenetic activity that keeps pinging my phone. So I'm pleased to see that the WhatsApp app for Wear OS also includes a really crucial feature for any kind of group messenger: a mute button.
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