Developer gets Android Wear working on Samsung Gear 2

A developer on the Xda forum has managed to get Android Wear running on the Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch. The smart watch normally has Tizen as its operating system. The first build of Android Wear is not really usable yet.

In January, a developer known on Xda as biktor_gj began an effort to get Android Wear running on the Galaxy Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo. The housing of those watches differs, but they share the same hardware: a Samsung Exynos 3250 dual-core soc, 512MB ram and 4GB storage memory. By default, the watches run Samsung’s own Tizen operating system.

The developer said it merged the Tizen kernel from the Gear 2 with an Android 4.4 kernel from the Galaxy S5 Mini. Android Wear and the ‘normal’ version of Android share the kernel, allowing biktor_gj to use a variant of the S5 Mini. In addition, a lot of adjustments were necessary. For example, the video drivers had to be rewritten to get the system working.

At this point, the system doesn’t do much more than boot. As a result, it is not yet suitable for normal use. For that reason, the developer does not release an image until the biggest problems have been solved. According to biktor_gj, it is not likely that his Android version can be easily ported to other Samsung watches that run Tizen, such as the Galaxy Gear and the Gear S, because they have a Qualcomm soc, which means that other drivers are necessary.