Pixel Watch Wear OS 5 update might have been pulled

Google looks to have halted the rollout of the Wear OS 5 update for the first-gen Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 after some users had their devices soft brick.

Over the past few hours, Pixel Watch owners have been unable to download Wear OS 5. Going to Settings > System > System updates and repeatedly tapping does not yield the update like it did earlier in the week. The factory and OTA images for manual install remain listed.

Most users have successfully installed Wear OS 5 and aren’t facing any issues. However, some Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 owners have been met with a black screen that only has a small Bluetooth logo at the bottom during the process. It’s not clear why this is happening.

The fix is resetting the device from Fastboot, with instructions available here, and setting up again. This is fortunately a straightforward process especially if you have a Google One backup.

However, it’s obviously not an ideal experience and Google pulling the update until it can figure out the problem is the right call. 

We’ve reached out to Google for more information.

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