If you’re one of the owners of a Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch running on Wear OS waiting for the latest system update, you might have to wait a little while longer. While there has been no official statement from the smartwatch maker, it seems that they have indeed put a pause on rolling out the update this February as they are “trying to iron out some issues”. What those issues are though was not indicated but this means you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting.
The update officially called H MR2 was announced back in September for smartwatches running on the Wear OS platform. Fossil then started rolling out the updates to the Gen 5 Wear OS devices but sometime early February, the update stopped. Since then, no devices have received an OTA notification even when owners check their device settings. There has been no official announcement from the brand itself, but as always, people take to other places to find out what’s going in.
In a subforum on Reddit, a Fossil representative has apparently confirmed that they are “holding” or pausing the system updates for Gen 5 as there are some issues they are still fixing. The rep did not specify what issues those are but did say they are “closer to the release date” without saying when that date will be. So far, there have been no reported issues from Gen 5 users who have previously received the update.
The H MR2 update brings a performance boost for smartwatches, including speeding up app launches and boot time by 20% as well as improve battery life. It also supposedly makes managing watch modes easier and making the pairing process faster. Normally, Wear OS updates are delivered through the Google Play Store but this one is a separate update. Whatever those issues are, hopefully they get fixed soon.
In the meantime Fossil Gen 5 users that haven’t gotten the performance boost would have to make do with their current firmware. It’s not actually bad or problematic but of course users would always want something faster and better.