EDIT: AS OF APRIL 23rd, SAMSUNG HAS FINALLY FIXED THE ISSUE, AND I CAN CONFIRM THAT I AM ABLE TO LOGIN USING MY XPERIA PHONE
What is the Wearable App?
The Wearable app is basically the main control and monitoring center of your Samsung Watch. Everything from your remaining battery, available storage, and RAM. This is what connects to your watch and provides notifications and other things like weather, updates, and phone synchronization.
Most importantly, this is your only source of apps and watch faces if you own a Samsung Watch. You won’t be able to get watch apps elsewhere. This is fine, this isn’t something I’d fault. It’s a solid platform where creators get to express their skills and earn a little extra on the side.
Some of the best watch faces I’ve seen come from this platform in fact. I’ve made a lot of favorites myself and it helped me better appreciate watch designs from brands I’ve never even heard of!
All in all, the whole point of the Galaxy Wearable app is to have everything in one convenient place without having to fiddle about with third-party software. Facer is an exception, which is a platform for additional watch face designs, but it should be noted that in order to get Facer, you still need to grab it from the Wearable store. Put it simply, if you want something for your watch, you need to visit this app. You need to learn to love it.
What’s the problem?
This isn’t a piece to simply hate on Samsung or anything like that. See, I wouldn’t choose the Galaxy Watch if I didn’t like it. In fact, it’s the reason I traveled to different malls just to finally settle on my first smartwatch choice, the Galaxy Watch. This really isn’t about the watch or any smartphones in general.
The problem comes from what the title suggests, the Wearable App doesn’t allow non-Samsung phone users to sign-in. Why is this a problem? Allow me to explain: you can’t customize the watch and retrieve purchases from the store, which is the whole point of having a non-static watch face.
A recent update on the Galaxy Wearable app made it so non-Samsung phone users like myself have a bugged sign-in form. Why not just remain signed-in? That would be a great idea, but the Wearable app has a security feature that automatically expires active logins after a set amount of days. A sort of security over usability kind of situation.
Recently though, a friend of mine just made his debut on the Wearable store, I wanted to try out his designs but something strange happened. At first I was greeted by the aforementioned ‘expired login’ dialog box. And then a blank white box filled my screen from top to bottom.
What you’re supposed to see here was a username and password field with a captcha right at the very bottom. As you can see, it‘s blank. This started some three days ago (for me). And at the time of writing, it hasn’t been patched out.
It wouldn’t be so bad if a login session wasn’t required to download free faces or apps, but everything is tied into your Samsung account. Again, normally not a fault, but in this strange circumstance, basically renders your device currently just stock.
“This problem doesn’t affect me.”
There are two possible reasons as to why you’re not affected by it:
- You’re a Samsung phone user (based on reports I’ve read, including my own device)
- You’re probably part of the lucky few that haven’t lost their login sessions (which I’ve never encountered anyone being this lucky so I’ll just assume it’s possible)
The only reason I even decided to bring this up was the lack of news coverage on it (again at the time of writing). There’s over 60 pages on the Samsung support page of people complaining about the exact same thing. And there are even rumors that Samsung is deleting posts, censoring people that complain about this exact thing, however this isn’t confirmed and I can’t confidently back this up, this isn’t a smear post to Samsung after all.
While I appreciate that Samsung’s moderators are trying their best to calm the angry mob down, I just don’t think it’s supposed to be the consumer’s responsibility to fix faulty software, don’t you think?
Switching to a Samsung phone also doesn’t sound like a very respectable solution. We already sunk quite a bit just to get an honestly pretty great watch, which is unfortunately hindered by what’s arguably its proprietary shackles right now.
Reading most of the support thread, most people complaining aren’t using a Samsung phone. In fact, if you visit the Google Play reviews section of the Galaxy Wearable app, you’ll find very similar complaints. Most replies of their support teams are canned and well, robotic. I get the feeling they’re doing damage control, which is always the knee-jerk reaction of any big company suddenly spawning negative PR.
What’s my solution? If you’re currently unable to sign-in to the Wearable app, here’s my advice:
- Don’t uninstall the Wearable app. This will reset your watch and all the purchased apps/faces you have installed on your watch. This won’t reset your account or anything, just the state of your watch.
- Don’t force stop and clear cache or clear data. This won’t do you any good and is quite honestly a waste of time. It might also reset your watch data, so don’t do it.
- Don’t factory reset your phone. This again, does not help. You’ll only give yourself a much bigger headache.
- If you’re currently still logged in and not using a Samsung phone, there’s not much you can do. You’re at the mercy of this bug.
Conclusion
I decided to write about this now because I haven’t seen any major news outlets picking this up yet, but I do hope someone out there gets wind of this situation. It’s really a shame for such a great smartwatch being pulled down by a login form.
Not only that but my father has one as well and we both use the same phone. A Sony Xperia XA1 Plus. He had the displeasure of resetting his watch and his installed purchases. Uninstalling the app is something you should NOT do at the moment. We usually share watch faces and have a great time discussing designs and what we like the most, but now that’s kind of not possible.
If you want to help, then you can spread the word. Maybe if you’re a journalist and you’re only now finding out about this, why not let the people know? It would be a huge disappointment if someone were to gift their loved one with a Samsung watch but they have the misfortune of not having a same-branded phone.
Perhaps a Wear OS would be a better choice for now, if you yourself are planning to get a smartwatch and you’re not a Samsung phone user. I personally don’t have any recommendations because I’m not sponsored nor do I have any experience with other brands.
But if you really want this watch, you may need to wait for a while. Or wait till next year, because we haven’t received an official word from Samsung.
