If you’re a fan of keeping track of software releases, you know that Wear OS isn’t exactly the easiest to keep track of. It has a separate versioning system compared to Android, even though it’s based on Android code. And new Wear OS versions typically come out at least a few months after the Android version they’re based on.
That can be confusing, but at least we’ve been seeing major new Android versions integrated into major new Wear OS versions consistently. That looks set to change, though, as there will apparently be a Wear OS 5.1 release, and it will be based on Android 15, even though Wear OS 5.0 is based on Android 14.
An “insider” is said to have revealed this information, saying that Wear OS 5.1 is currently being tested on the Pixel watch 2internally at Google. Note that while this is currently called Wear OS 5.1, there is always the possibility that Google renames it to Wear OS 6 before release.
If that doesn’t happen, the fact that Wear OS 5.1 is based on a different version of Android than Wear OS 5 means that Google has finally fully decoupled the underlying Android version from the Wear OS version. This will make it harder in the future to quickly tell whether one Wear OS version is running a newer version of Android than another.