Google just made another essential Wear OS app exclusive to Pixel Watch

Google is making big strides to ensure anyone who wants a smartwatch chooses a Google Pixel Watch. Today, the brand announced that the Clock app for Wear OS will only be available on the Pixel Watch.

That's a pretty significant app to wall off, particularly on a smartwatch. That's the app which controls things like the alarms, timers and stopwatch functionality.

According to the blog post, those with a Pixel Watch will continue to have access to the app and its updates as they always have. For any other Wear OS watches, you'll continue to be able to use the app if it's already installed on your device.

You won't continue to get updates, though, so the form it exists in now is how it will remain. If you didn't already have the Google Clock app installed, you'll no longer be able to find it on the Play Store. Instead, you'll have to access whatever the default clock app for your watch is, or download a third-party alternative.

That means anyone with a different Wear OS watch brand will miss out on the Material 3 Expressive redesign. That promises new interfaces, Dynamic Colours and new tile designs.

It comes just weeks after the brand confirmed that its Weather app would no longer be available on Wear OS 6. That was said to be in response to the variety of other apps available on the market for users to select from.

While the news may seem puzzling, I actually think it makes a lot of sense in the modern age. Google's big play in recent years has been for its Gemini AI assistant, which can easily handle requests about the Weather and simple timing tasks.

By removing the app for those tasks, users are more likely to pivot towards using their voice to control them, which in turn would increase utility of Gemini.