Shazam, the Apple-owned song recognition service, now works on your Android smartwatch, even if your phone isn’t with you—with a couple caveats. Once you update Shazam on Wear OS, you’ll be able to use it to identify songs directly on your smartwatch. This was first reported by 9to5Google and is a significant development for people with Wear OS smartwatches.
You can get the latest Shazam update from Play Store and use the app whether your phone is with you or not. Another new feature is the ability to instantly sync recognized songs across devices. Once you open the app, you’ll have to tap the Shazam icon for it to start listening to the music playing around you. Note that Shazam on Wear OS still requires internet to function. If your watch is offline, the app will log the songs you try to identify, and name them for you once you’re back online. You can then listen to these songs on the music streaming service of your choice.
Google ships a built-in music identifier feature with Wear OS, and that’s still faster than using Shazam on your Android smartwatch. Your Google Pixel smartphone ships with a neat Now Playing feature that automatically identifies songs playing around you. It would be nice to have this feature added to Wear OS, but the unfortunate reality is that Google has slowed down the pace of development on the smartwatch platform.
For some people, Shazam may work out to be a better alternative to the built-in Wear OS song recognition feature because you can sync that across platforms and have it automatically add identified songs to a Spotify playlist. It’s good to know that Apple is investing in Shazam’s development on platforms it doesn’t own (RIP Dark Sky’s Android app).