Paid Apps cannot be Installed on Android Wear Devices
Are you one of those people who have ordered one of the Android Wear devices recently revealed? Well, we know that Android Wear is barely out of the box, so everyone is more than curious to find out more about it (if not even experiencing it), but we must tell you about a major issue. To be more precise, it seems that the wearables aren’t at all getting along with paid apps. Why aren’t these paid apps able to be installed in Android Wear? That is what we are trying to find out.
Android Wear and App Encryption
When it comes to the app installation experience for Android Wear, we can tell you from the start that things are a little different. We are generally used with that method of pulling up a bunch of Play Store listings on the screen, but this time Google has decided that it would be much better to organize the apps on your phone so that that will install their own micro-sized companions to your watch.
So, when the Android app is downloaded from the Play Store, it is immediately checked for a Wear-compatible app, which is installed over Bluetooth to the paired watch.
The process shouldn’t be at all complicated, but paid apps also coms with that App Encryption that changes the situation. Announced at Google I/O 2012, the App Encryption was added to the Play Store to encode paid apps with a device-specific key, making them more difficult to crack.
For unknown reasons, the new Android Wear devices cannot find Wear apps in encrypted packages. In these conditions, we are talking about a bug which blocks all paid apps, so all that we can do is to wait for a fix as soon as possible.
One More Advice…
This bug is indeed a major problem, but at least it was discovered before many byers will even receive the first run of Android Wear devices shipments. In any case, we have just one more advice for you: until the problem is solved, avoid spending money on any apps specifically designed for Wear.
Just have a little more patience and keep checking our page for updates. We’ll soon return with fresh details.
