Samsung Gear Fit can be made to work with many Android devices by sideloading APKs

Samsung hasn’t yet learned its lesson with the Gear family of smartwatches. Even though the original Galaxy Gear sold very poorly, the company hasn’t bothered to expand compatibility in its new line of Gear devices. Yes, the new Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit are only compatible with a few Samsung devices. However, it’s been discovered that it may not be difficult to make the Gear Fit work with many other devices.

If you sideload the Gear Manager and Gear Fitness APKs onto a device running Android 4.3 or higher, you may be able to get the smartwatch to work! While you won’t get 100 percent functionality, most features work just fine. That includes notifications, changing the background and Find My Phone.

This workaround has been confirmed to work on the Nexus 5, the HTC One (M7) and the One (M8), and it may work with many other devices as well. This alone shouldn’t be a reason to throw down the money for a Gear Fit, though, as it’s always possible that an update could break compatibility. Still, it’s cool to know that the Gear Fit is far less reliant on Samsung devices than the Galaxy Gear was.

There were some rumors about Samsung making the Gear line officially compatible with more devices, but there hasn’t been any more info on that since. Hopefully Samsung will go through with it, or else the new Gear line will fall to the same fate as the Galaxy Gear.

Source: 9to5 Google
Via: Android Community

source: androidandme