A member has posted on the XDA Developers forums that he has succeeded in porting Android Wear to run on the Samsung Gear 2 wearable device.
Samsung has only released on smartwatch that runs on the Android Wear operating system for wearable devices, namely the Gear Live. For all other wearable devices of the company, Samsung has used its own Tizen operating system.
Tizen has helped create Samsung's own ecosystem for its wearable devices, in addition to allowing Gear smartwatches to offer many more features and longer battery lives compared to devices that are powered by Android Wear.
However, despite the benefits of Tizen to Samsung's smartwatches, there is a certain portion of users that clamor for the company to begin using Android Wear on all their wearable devices. Reasons for users to want the shift of operating system include access to higher levels of developer support, the Google Now feature and Google's technologies on voice recognition.
With the company's investment into the Tizen operating system, it is unlikely that Samsung will make the sudden shift to using Android Wear exclusively. However, the efforts of an XDA Developer forums member could open up the possibility of running Android Wear on more Samsung devices.
XDA Developers forum member biktor_gj was able to port Android Wear into his Gear 2 device, successfully getting the operating system to launch on the smartwatch after working on the project for the past four months.
While the Android Wear port is still currently a work in progress and not yet available to be downloaded by the general public, the success in booting the Gear 2 into Android Wear opens up the possibility of faster developments being made in the near future.
With the success in launching Android Wear on the Gear 2 smartwatch, the possibility of porting Android Wear to the Gear S smartwatch also increases as the two devices are very similar to one another.
While the success of booting Android Wear in the Gear 2 may or may not lead to a complete working port for the operating system to work with Samsung wearable devices, at the very least, it provides hope for users that prefer to replace the Tizen operating system in their Samsung devices.
There are still certain issues with the Android Wear port project, such as the fact that audio is not yet working. Hopefully the issues can be resolved soon, as the project tis picking up with more developers volunteering to help out.
