Wear OS 5 Promises Enhanced Music Streaming with Bluetooth LE Audio

One of the many benefits of owning a smartwatch is that you can play music, podcasts, or audiobooks from your favorite streaming services during workouts, all while leaving your phone at home. All you need is your smartwatch, a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, and access to some audio content (either downloaded locally or streamed if your watch supports mobile data). Using your smartwatch to play audio content while it’s also tracking your workout can be really heavy on its battery, but fortunately, the upcoming Wear OS 5 update could bring some improvements to that front thanks to Bluetooth LE Audio.

Currently, when you wirelessly stream some audio from your smartwatch to a pair of earbuds over Bluetooth, that audio data is transmitted over a Bluetooth Classic connection between your smartwatch and earbuds. In contrast, your smartwatch sends data to your smartphone over Bluetooth LE, where the LE stands for Low Energy. As its name implies, Bluetooth LE is a low-energy version of the Bluetooth radio. It’s designed specifically for connecting with IoT devices that have tiny batteries so that they can last for days, weeks, or even longer on a single charge depending on the frequency of data transmissions.

Until recently, it hasn’t been possible to transmit audio data over Bluetooth, simply because there wasn’t a standardized way to do it. However, with the growing use of Bluetooth hearing aids came demand for enabling audio data transmissions over Bluetooth LE in order to extend the battery life of these important assistive devices. The industry body behind the Bluetooth standard thus created Bluetooth LE Audio, which consists of a new set of Bluetooth profiles and features for streaming audio over Bluetooth LE (hence the name).

Initial support for Bluetooth LE Audio was added in Android 13. LE Audio unicast support was added first, which enables streaming audio from a single source device to a single sink device over Bluetooth LE. Support for LE Audio broadcasts, which allow for streaming audio from a single source device to many sink devices over Bluetooth LE, is being readied for the upcoming Android 15 update.

Wear OS, however, doesn’t get features at the same pace as regular Android since it targets smartwatches rather than smartphones and tablets. It looks like the upcoming Wear OS 5 update — which will be based on Android 14 — will be the first Wear OS release to support Bluetooth LE Audio, at least LE Audio unicasts.

While I was digging through the first Wear OS 5 developer preview build released in May, I noticed a new string in the ClockworkSettings app that suggests a dedicated “LE Audio” preference will be added to Bluetooth settings. It’s likely that, when a Wear OS 5 smartwatch that supports LE Audio is connected to a pair of earbuds that supports LE Audio — such as Samsung’s new Galaxy Buds 3 series — an LE Audio toggle will appear that lets users enable the feature.

Although there are a handful of earbuds and headphones that support LE Audio, there aren’t any smartwatches that support the feature, at least not yet. Bluetooth LE Audio relies on features present in version 5.2 of the Bluetooth core specification, so technically, any Wear OS smartwatch that supports Bluetooth 5.2 should be capable of supporting LE Audio. However, things aren’t that simple, since the smartwatch maker might need the help of the product’s Bluetooth chip’s vendor for firmware support, not to mention all the testing, validation, and certification steps that rolling out such a firmware update would entail.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s upcoming Pixel Watch 3 series supports Bluetooth LE Audio, but so far, there haven’t been any leaks suggesting that to be the case. Google’s hardware event next month should shed light on what features the new Pixel Watch 3 series will bring, though, and we’re hoping LE Audio support is one of them.(OS 5)