Wink Shortcuts on Android Wear

I recently picked up a Fossil Gen 5 watch, having been a Pebble wearer for several years. One of the biggest reasons I moved from Pebble to Android Wear was that the Wink Shortcuts app for Pebble stopped working within the last several months, presumably with Wink deprecating some APIs. I really didn’t like pulling my phone out in the car to trigger Wink shortcuts.

Luckily, the Wink application on Android has a built-in option to show shortcuts on your Wear device, but as a new user to Android Wear, I was a bit confused on how to set this up. Here’s a quick guide if you’re stuck in the same boat as I was.

This is assuming you actually have the Wink app installed on your phone and have it configured. When you’re adding/editing a shortcut in the Wink app, there will be an option to make the shortcut available on Android Wear:

Now, open your app launcher, and select Play Store:

Go to Apps on Your Phone:

Find Wink in your app list, and press on the small download button next to the app icon and text:

You should see an ‘Installing’ screen, then the Wink app will be available in your normal Android Wear launcher screen. Now, when you launch the Wink app on your Wear device, you’ll have a horizontally-scrolling list of shortcuts that you’ve made available, and you can activate a shortcut by tapping on the screen while the shortcut name and icon are displayed.

That’s it!

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