Can one rant about Wear OS here since it’s technically still Android?

When Samsung was making watches on Tizen, they released products like Frontier (boasting upto 3 day battery life), original Galaxy Watch (boasting upto 4 days battery life). Cue they switched to Wear OS with GW4 and with the 40mm variant, the battery life doggedly remained at a pathetic 1 day with AOD on.

Even with release of newer generations like Ultra, they are barely hitting 3 days with ~590mAh battery. Why is Wear OS such a battery hog?

I own a Galaxy Watch 6 and the watch OS uses like 6 GB storage and 1+ GB in perpetual RAM. Is it really so that displaying time and running couple of apps in the background takes more memory than GNOME 46?

  • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    Yeah the battery life is stupidly short. Main reason I was looking at sport watches from Garmin and Suunto instead and ended up getting Suunto Race with battery lasting about 2 weeks

    • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deOP
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      1 month ago

      My first purchase GW4 40mm was very hastily done. I mainly wanted a watch that could stream music independently and was under the assumption that only Wear OS watches were capable of that(on the Android side). Couple that with the high initial cost of Garmin, and I overlooked it. But it is a mess if you have to put a watch on a charging Puck for 2 hrs daily(that only had 5W wireless charging).

      Unless Wear OS really changes it’s direction in the next few years(and I hope my relatively newer GW 6 Atleast lasts for 3 years), I would be looking for a Garmin as well.