4 Essential Android Smartwatch Apps You Should Always Install First – BGR

When you first unbox your new Android smartwatch, the sheer volume of choices in the Play Store can feel overwhelming. But it’s worth resisting the urge to download everything at once, as that can quickly clutter your watch face and drain battery life. The apps you install early on play a big role in shaping how useful (or frustrating) that first week with your smartwatch feels.

To make the most of your investment from day one, it helps to start with a small set of core apps such as Google Gemini, Google Keep, Strava, and SleepisolBio. Together, they cover the essential pillars of the wearable experience: productivity, health and fitness tracking, communication, and everyday convenience.

Sure, with hundreds of Android smartwatch apps available, there’s no single “correct” order for what to download first. Personal preferences will always play a role, but starting with these four apps gives you a strong foundation; helping you get things done more efficiently from the get-go, and making it easier to enhance your smartwatch experience over time.

One of the biggest reasons to own an Android smartwatch is efficiency, meaning not having to pull out your phone for every small task. Google Gemini’s Wear OS app, which will officially replace Google Assistant, helps maximize that efficiency on Wear OS through faster, more natural voice control, AI-powered reasoning, and deeper automation. Think of Gemini as the chaperone on your wrist, giving you instant access to almost everything you’d want from a smartwatch: Checking the weather, setting reminders, sending messages on apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, making calls, scheduling meetings, or controlling smart home gadgets.

Gemini also improves how you control fitness apps on your smartwatch. You can accurately start, pause, or stop workouts completely hands-free. Thanks to its native Google integration, you can ask health or fitness-related questions on the spot, whether you’re mid-run, at the gym, or out for a walk. If you use Gmail, Gemini can put your email productivity on steroids. It can summarize emails, read them out to you from start to finish, suggest replies, or even help draft complete responses.

A real standout of the Gemini voice assistant is its ability to understand natural, conversational language and handle multi-step, multimodal tasks. This is something simpler voice assistants like Google Assistant could never quite do. For example, you can ask Gemini to find the top Italian restaurants near you and text a friend to meet you there at 8 p.m., all in a single prompt, and it will handle everything seamlessly.

Google Keep is one of the most popular note-taking apps out there, and installing it on your Android smartwatch will seriously crank up convenience. It lets you jot down notes and ideas using both text and voice. Voice input is the real star here, as it allows you to capture ideas even when you’re in the middle of an activity, like driving or running, and can’t pull out your phone. It will especially come in clutch when waiting isn’t an option, such as when you’re setting an important reminder (a meeting, birthday, etc.) or quickly noting down a work idea before you forget it.

Not only can you add both notes and lists, such as to-do lists and grocery lists, set reminders, and even check items off once you’ve completed tasks, but Google Keep also integrates neatly with the watch’s tiles and complications. The tile feature lets you create a new note or a list by simply swiping left or right from your watch face. Even better, you can also add a specific note as a tile. While only the first few lines of the note will be visible, it ensures a crucial piece of information is right in front of your eyes whenever you glance at your smartwatch. Complications, meanwhile, work similarly to widgets on your watch face. Tapping it lets you directly add a new note or list without having to open the Google Keep app and sift through multiple options.

The only feature Google Keep still lacks on smartwatches is the ability to fully edit existing notes. However, since you’ll mainly be using it to quickly capture ideas rather than organize them (which is more easily done on your phone or computer anyway), that’s hardly a complaint.

Strava arguably needs no introduction. It’s part fitness tracker and part social platform — a unique blend that’s made it one of the most popular apps in the world. Once you’ve set it up using your smartphone, the Strava smartwatch app lets you track activities like running, cycling, walking, or hiking directly from your wrist. It comes with large, glove-friendly buttons and haptic confirmation for starts and stops, and can automatically pause (and resume) activity recording when you stop moving.

Thanks to Strava, you don’t need to even carry your phone when you head out. This addresses one of the biggest pain points of modern fitness tracking: While phones are relatively light, they’re still inconvenient to carry while running or cycling. Strava eliminates that friction by using your smartwatch’s built-in GPS to record your route and collects key metrics such as pace, distance covered, time, and heart rate. After you complete an activity, everything automatically syncs to the Strava mobile app, where you get a full summary of your stats and route map.

While you can’t really engage with Strava’s social features, like the activity feed, leaderboards, likes, and comments through its smartwatch app, simply having Strava available on your wrist still provides that much-needed push to stay competitive, thanks to how convenient it is.

Around 32.8% of adults don’t get enough sleep, and sleep disorders like insomnia and sleep apnea have become increasingly common in recent years. Even though technology has stepped up, products like Whoop, which sit at the forefront of the sleep-tracking revolution, aren’t exactly budget-friendly. Still, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on meaningful sleep insights.

Enter SleepisolBio, Google Play’s best app for watches in 2025. It’s a personalized sleep management service that tracks your real-time heart rate, analyzes your individual sleep and circadian rhythm, and recommends optimal sleep times. It also offers four types of therapy (Sleep, Focus, Healing, and Stress) tailored to your individual needs. SleepisolBio is a freemium Wear OS app. While it offers the vast majority of its services for free, including its sleep therapy features with 48 sound therapies, mindfulness content with 16 audio tracks, bedtime stories, and various types of alarms, its unique AI analyzer is a paid add-on. This particular feature combs through your sleep data, circadian rhythm, and snoring, which it uses to recommend an optimal sleep management plan.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the SleepisolBio Wear OS app is used to obtain your real-time heart rate. However, it cannot be used independently on your Android smartwatch. You’ll first need to download and set up the SleepisolBio app on your smartphone.