Although Android has received all the attention in recent months, with the launch of Android 15 and the first new features of Android 16, we cannot forget the rest of the systems maintained by Google. In fact, everything indicates that systems like Android Automotive, Google TV or Wear OS will receive many new features throughout 2025.
Good morning, Android Authority has discovered one of these novelties in the Wear OS code, and it will be one of those that can completely change the way we use the watch. Concretely, this novelty aims to solve one of the big inconveniences of Wear OS watches, which probably means that few people take advantage of it properly.
Concretely, the next version of Wear OS will change how tickets and passes are accessed and are used via the watch's NFC connection. Currently these types of passes are stored in Google Wallet, the company's official application that allows you to store all types of cards. However, this means that the process of, say, getting on a bus is more complicated than it should be.
If we want to use a pass or ticket that we have stored in our account, we must first unlock the watch and go to the Google Wallet app for WearOS. Then we look for the pass and press it so that the NFC connection of the watch is activated, and we can finally pass it through the reader. A real waste that is really not necessary and which, fortunately, will change.
As discovered in the source code, Wear OS will allow use tickets and passes with a simple tap of the watch. To get started, simply unlock the watch, but you don't need to have the screen on; Therefore, if we do not have a password on the watch, there is nothing to do. The only thing we will have to do to use a ticket in Wear OS is simply tap on the watch screen, and the system will automatically display the pass and connect to the reader via NFC.
Free Android
There are still many details to be finalized regarding this implementation. For example, we don't know how the watch will detect if we need a pass or a ticket and how it will display it; You also have to imagine that you can switch between the different stored cards to be able to use the correct one.
It is possible that Wear OS detects if there is an NFC connection nearby, and you would then simply tap the screen to display the cards; In this case, the operation would be contextual and would not always be shown, which is logical. The code only indicates that it will not be necessary to open Google Wallet to be able to use the passes, so it all depends on how the company's engineers solved it. Additionally, it's very possible that we still have to wait a bit for this feature, and it probably won't arrive until the next version of Wear OS.
