Wrist Programs, Timers and Tools

On the watch, swipe to Programs to see every built-in tool as a grid of icons - Calculator, Network Monitor, Mini-game, Stopwatch, Water flashlight, Voice recorder, Clipboard, System information, Tourist and Phone camera among them, some only where this build offers them. You can also reach the whole grid from the Programs tile - see tiles and complications. Each icon is drawn in the same accent color that program carries on the phone, so you recognize the same program at a glance on both devices; the shortcut tiles for programs and sections use that color too, as a filled circle behind the glyph, with the glyph tinted light or dark for contrast against it.

The row on the watch home screen that always used to open the live broadcast now opens whichever program you opened most recently instead - the game, the water flashlight, the stopwatch, whatever it was - under that program's own name and icon. Nothing opened yet, or the broadcast itself was the last thing you opened? The row stays the broadcast shortcut it always was. A program this build does not offer never appears there, and the Programs tile itself is unchanged.

Open Calculator for everyday sums without waking the phone. The keypad opens on its first row with every key at a full touch-sized target, the minus sign is drawn full-width so it is never mistaken for a hyphen, and clear and backspace sit on a red plate so neither is pressed by accident. The running value is right-aligned in its own color, like a calculator's own display register, and the operation you picked stays shown beside it - tap it again to repeat that operation on the next number. Its function menu lays its extra operations out in columns instead of one long list.

A tap on the result copies it to the watch clipboard - handy for pasting into a chat or a note on the wrist without going through the phone. Watches older than Android 13 show their own short confirmation; where the system already shows one, the watch does not repeat it. Tapping the display does nothing while it is showing an error.

The Google Play watch build draws the whole calculator inside the round glass; the full sideload build keeps its own established layout.

Open Mini-game from Programs for a quick round of dodging the shadows to the exit. The board is capped to the largest square the round display can draw whole, with room left under the header, so on a round watch every corner of the board and the level-finished button stay inside the glass. Score, level and turn count sit in a band around the board instead of stacking two lines above it.

Every round deals a fresh random board, so two games in a row are never the same, and restarting a level draws a new layout rather than a second try at the one you just left - reopening a save from mid-game still returns the exact board and position you left it at. Each new board opens with a short arrow pointing from your figure to the nearest exit, then fades on its own. The board also gets harder as you climb: the number of shadows chasing you rises in steps up to a cap, and the level you have reached is shown beside the turn count. Finish a level and the next one starts by itself after a short pause; press and hold anywhere on the board for a menu to skip the turn, restart the level or exit.

Stopwatch runs one, two or four independent timings on a single screen - handy for timing more than one runner, or more than one pot on the stove. Each participant gets its own Start/Lap and Stop/Reset button, and Start all, Stop all and Reset all control every one of them together. A results page lists every lap you took for each participant, and the reading stays correct even if the screen goes dark while it is running. The stopwatch keeps running after you leave it: the watch face, recent apps and the Programs tile show it, one tap away from the running timing. The first start asks you to allow notifications for that; without them the stopwatch counts just the same, only without the indicator.

Water flashlight turns the screen itself into a light a wet wrist cannot switch off by accident: the display goes white at full brightness with the time and a short reminder over it, and touch and rotation stop doing anything else. Because a splash on the glass can register as a tap, no single input turns the light off - it takes three quick swipe-back gestures within two seconds, or a long press of a watch button on a watch whose button reaches the app. One stray back gesture, exactly what a wet glass produces, leaves the light burning.

The watch has no flash unit, so the screen is the only light there is. It lives among the other Programs and does not replace the watch's own water-lock mode, which no app can turn on for you.

*Sideload version only:* the full watch build also holds the system shade closed while the flashlight is open, so a wet swipe down from the top cannot reach quick settings.

Voice recorder lets you record, play back and send a note without the phone in hand. Recording keeps running even if the screen goes dark or the watch slips off your wrist, because it runs as a background recording; while it runs, the status dot and the elapsed time carry their own color so you can tell at a glance that it is live. Play a finished note straight from the recorder screen or from any row in My notes, in the watch's own player.

Every note gets a readable title built from when it was recorded, and it appears alongside your other audio. Press and hold a note for the same file menu an ordinary file gets, including rename - which is what tells apart two notes taken a second apart - as well as send and delete. A setting chooses whether a finished note is sent to the phone automatically or held until you send it yourself; a note recorded out of the phone's reach is marked as waiting and leaves on its own once the link is back.

If the watch's own note store ever fails to open - a corrupt file, or an update it cannot read - the app rebuilds its list from the recordings still saved on the watch instead of losing them. The recovered notes wait for you to send them by hand so nothing goes out twice, and the list explains once that it was rebuilt.

Network Monitor opens on a summary dashboard with your active link, local and external address, and a set of sections that each carry a live reading of their own - the sections wrap into a cloud of pill-shaped panels sized to their own text, so the whole set fits with far less scrolling than one full-width row per section would take. Every page shows its own title, its readings and the permission notice, and you leave a section with the usual edge swipe. The sections are Wi-Fi with frequency, standard and a restartable signal trend; Mobile, which explains itself on a watch with no modem; Bluetooth; satellites listed by constellation with coordinates, accuracy and fix time; traffic rates with resettable counters; internet with an on-demand reachability check; and History. Addresses copy to the clipboard with a tap, and each section can open its matching system settings screen.

History records a row only when the active connection actually changes, with the time of that change shown above the transport name, so a session that stays on one network leaves one row instead of twenty copies of the same reading. On a watch running Android 12 or newer, tap the permission notice to grant the access the Bluetooth and visible-Wi-Fi readings need - the fields fill in on the next reading.

System information, found in Applications rather than Settings, lays out its groups two fields to a row - a field too wide for half the screen keeps a row of its own - and answers questions no watch settings screen does: thermal state, battery temperature, voltage and charge left in mAh, uptime, boot count, whether the watch is exempt from battery optimisation, whether the app is background-restricted, and the reason its process last stopped; the full sensor list with each sensor's maker, power draw and resolution; chipset, instruction set, core count and low-memory flag; and the Wi-Fi bands and standards the watch supports. The phone connection line names each linked device, whether it is nearby or reached through the cloud, both node IDs and the pair's shared capabilities. Storage measures the app's own data, cache and cache reserve, not the whole watch. Long lists collapse to a count you tap open, collapsed group headings sit in a wrapping row of their own so the whole report is reached with far less scrolling, and a Refresh button re-reads whatever changes while the screen is open. A section this watch cannot answer says why instead of just disappearing.

Tap any value to copy it to the clipboard with a haptic tick; press and hold the sensor list to copy the whole thing at once. Send to phone carries the full report to the paired phone, which saves it as a text file next to its own logs and opens the share sheet from a notification - the watch tells you in words whether it arrived, including when the phone's notifications are off.

*Sideload version only:* an Extended section adds the SHA-256 fingerprint of the certificate the installed app is signed with, for confirming you are running a genuine build.

Tourist wraps your speed, altitude, compass, coordinates, satellites, steps, trip distance, sun times and heart rate into a set of content-width tiles you can scroll and promote to the top; the compass draws as a large rotating needle, and a Grant access button appears only while the location permission is still missing. Body temperature shows up where the watch itself reports a temperature sensor. Its Steps and Heart Rate tiles mirror what Motion Monitor and Heart Rate measure in detail - see viewing health and sensor info.

Swimming or running with a wet or busy screen? Tap the lock icon on the active panel to lock touch - the readings keep updating, but nothing you brush against the glass can change them. Only a press of a watch button unlocks it again.

Something is not behaving and support asked for a log? Open About on the watch and tap Send logs to developer. The watch hands the log to your paired phone, which files it beside its own logs and offers both together by email - one message instead of hunting through two devices.

Phone camera streams a live picture, with sound, from your paired phone's camera to the watch over the shared local Wi-Fi network - every lens the phone offers shows up on the wrist, switching lenses keeps the stream running, and Stop on the watch closes the camera on the phone too.

The full sideload build lets you arm this in advance from the phone's Wear OS settings, so the phone can stay in a pocket when you ask for the stream; the Google Play build confirms each request with one tap on the phone's notification instead. If a sideload phone has not been armed yet, the watch now says to start the camera broadcast on the phone, rather than the wrong advice to check the phone's notifications.

Clipboard carries text both ways between the watch and the paired phone, one explicit action on each side. On the watch, open Clipboard to see what your watch's clipboard holds and send it to the phone, which drops the text straight onto its own clipboard and lets you know it arrived. From the phone, the Wear Companion window carries a matching action to send its own clipboard to the watch. Either side always states the outcome - taken, no device in reach, no answer, or the reason the other side declined - so a send never fails silently. Only text travels this way; files and pictures keep their own transfer - see browsing files on the watch.

Need to show someone exactly what the watch is displaying? From the phone's Wear Companion window, ask the paired watch for a screenshot of itself. The watch photographs whatever the app is currently showing - never the watch face or another app - and sends the picture back the same way any other file from the watch arrives, announced by the usual notification. Nothing needs to be tapped on the watch itself; the phone states the outcome under the action - sent, no watch in reach, no answer, or the reason the watch declined.