If you like to follow software versions, you know Wear OS isn’t the most straightforward to keep track of. It has a separate versioning system compared to Android, even though it’s based on Android code. And new Wear OS versions generally come out at least a few months after the Android version they’re based on gets released.
That may be confusing but at least we’ve consistently seen big new Android versions integrated into big new Wear OS versions. That, however, seems set to change, as apparently there will be a Wear OS 5.1 release, and this one will be based on Android 15, even though Wear OS 5.0 is based on Android 14.
An “insider” has allegedly revealed this information, saying that Wear OS 5.1 is currently in testing on the Pixel Watch 2, internally at Google. Note that while this is being referred to as Wear OS 5.1 currently, there’s always the possibility that Google renames it to Wear OS 6 prior to its release.
If that doesn’t happen, then Wear OS 5.1 being based on a different Android version than Wear OS 5 means Google has finally fully decoupled the underlying Android version from the Wear OS version. This will make it harder in the future to quickly figure out if a Wear OS version uses a newer Android version than another.
