Wear OS users will lose access to Play Music in the next few weeks

Wear OS smartwatch users will lose access to Google Play Music within weeks. The service is being abandoned in favour of Youtube Music.

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However, it looks like the transition will not go as smoothly as many have hoped. Google has announced on its support page that in a few weeks “users will no longer be able to use or download Google Play Music on their Wear OS by Google smartwatches”.

The search giant is hoping to bring a better music experience in the months ahead with YouTube Music. This has 60 million songs which users can stream.

However the integration is still work in progress and at the outset users will only be able to use their Wear OS smartwatch to remotely control the YouTube Music app on their smartphone. When users open up YouTube Music on their phone, controls will automatically appear on the watch.

Google Play Music was launched in 2011. It allows users to upload their own songs and access them whenever they want. But this is not as easy with Youtube Music. Plus, there’s no way to download music.

Google is giving users until the end of this year to transfer their Google Play Music libraries. The company has published a blog post explaining how to do this. Depending on the size of your library, the process can take a few minutes or a few days. You can use Youtube Music as normal during the upload.

Users could always resort to a third party app or one of the popular music players such as Spotify. And judging by comments on social media some might take this route. Needless to say, this has left quite a few unhappy about the situation.

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