Wear OS 6 Could Bring a ‘Water Lock’ Mode to Your Pixel Watch

The Apple Watch has a feature called Water Lock. This basically locks the smartwatch’s screen so that when you’re swimming, you don’t accidentally activate certain features. Now, according to a report from Android Authority, a similar Water Lock feature could be coming to the Pixel Watch as part of the Wear OS 6 update.

Water Lock coming to the Pixel Watch

We should preface this by saying that the Pixel Watch already has a similar feature called Touch Lock. This feature effectively disables the touch screen and crown of the smartwatch, making it perfect if you’re swimming and don’t want any accidental activations. Smartwatches rely on capacitive touchscreens, which are the standard for the majority of touchscreen displays these days.

If you’ve ever gotten the screen of your phone wet and noticed erratic behavior, that’s why, and that’s where Touch Lock comes in handy. So, what is Water Lock? Based on Android Authority’s discovery, it sounds like Google could simply be renaming Touch Lock to Water Lock to make it a bit more obvious for users who plan to use the smartwatch to swim.

The current code strings don’t really tell us much, but hopefully, we should have more details once Wear OS 6 is released to the public.

No water ejection feature

Now, the Water Lock feature on smartwatches like the Apple Watch and the Samsung Galaxy Watch series behaves slightly differently. At its core, it still locks the touchscreen to prevent accidental activations. However, it also offers a water ejection feature. This uses the smartwatch’s built-in speaker to generate a sound that uses vibrations to expel any water that might be left behind in the watch after a swim.

In Google’s case, the code strings do not mention anything about water ejection. It is possible this could be a feature, but for now, it doesn’t look like it. Like we said, the current information suggests it might simply be a renaming of the existing Touch Lock. We are crossing our fingers and hoping that Google introduces water ejection to the Pixel Watch. But we’ll have to wait and see.

The first Wear OS Developer Preview was announced at Google I/O last month. There are a bunch of changes, including more customization options for watch faces, richer color schemes, and richer media controls. We’ve also come across reports suggesting the Pixel Watch could get adaptive charging.