How to Potentially Fix Lag Issues on Android Wear 2.0 Smartwatches

Many users, since upgrading to Android Wear 2.0, have reported severe slowdowns where the device lags heavily and appears to freeze up at times. Often, waking the screen of the device and attempting to slide a notification card up will crawl the watch into a slow, unusable mess for a brief period of time. Lots of menus lag, and doing nearly anything renders the device almost useless.

Thankfully, a Reddit user by the name of Yozakgg has discovered how to fix this, and the method is relatively simple. Why does it happen? “Ok Google” detection. Users don’t even need root access to fix this—anyone can fix disable this feature on their Android Wear 2.0 watch if it is lagging. At first, it seemed to only work on the Huawei Watch 2, but later reports showed that all Android Wear 2.0 watches can suffer from the issue.

How to fix Lag Issues on Android Wear 2.0

The fix is simple as we’re just going to disable “Ok Google” hotword detection. Simply navigate to Settings > Personalization then scroll down and disable “Ok Google detection” as outlined in the screenshots below.

And that’s it! That’s all you have to do. No extra software needed, no ADB access, and no root access needed on the device. This simply disables the ability to say “Ok Google” out loud and trigger your watch’s always-listening feature. Holding down the power button to activate the function will still work if you want to activate voice search, so overall this settings change should not affect functionality all that much on your Android Wear smartwatch.

The Reddit user found the fix by running the “adb shell top” command which listed the running processes on their Android Wear 2.0  smartwatch, as shown in the screenshot below. They found that the top running process was the Google application and thus it was draining a huge amount of resources.

This is a useful command to know, as it can help users debug what is drawing the most CPU power (and thus, battery life) from their device at any given time. It works on smartwatches and Android phones alike. If your Android Wear 2.0 smartwatch suffers from lag, maybe give it a try!