This app lets you use an Apple Watch with an Android phone

Whether the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market is debatable, but what’s undeniable is how well Apple has managed to master the products around it. AirPods continue to dominate the truly wireless earbud market, and the Apple Watch remains one of the most refined smartwatch experiences you can get. Unfortunately, Apple accessories work best when you have an iPhone to go with them. In fact, the Apple Watch doesn’t work with Android.

I recently migrated to a OnePlus device only to find that I have to carry around my iPhone just to keep my Apple Watch useful. Then I came across Merge Watch, an app that claims to bridge the gap and allow me to pair my Apple Watch with an Android phone. People have also found workarounds in the past to make this happen, but they need the cellular version of the Apple Watch. At this point, you’re using two devices that aren’t talking to each other.

You must first activate your Apple Watch with an iPhone. You then install the Merge Watch app both on your Apple Watch through its App Store and on your Android device through the Play Store. Launch the app on both devices and grant it the required permissions: it asks for Bluetooth permissions, health data, notification access, and battery optimization exceptions. Tap your phone name on your Apple Watch and confirm the pairing request by typing the six-digit code into your phone.

Health data is synced with Google Fit and takes a while to display when you first set up the app. Assuming the setup process went well, your Android phone and Apple Watch should now be able to communicate with each other.

Pairing the two devices is one thing, but how much of the Apple Watch experience transfers to Android is another. Surprisingly, notification forwarding works very well. You can even reply to messages using your Apple Watch. When you listen to music on Spotify or any other app, you have playback controls on your wrist. Google Fit’s user interface isn’t my favorite thing in the world, but it syncs with health data collected by my Apple Watch.

You probably don’t want all the apps on your Android phone buzzing on your wrist, so you can turn off notifications for each app through the Merge Watch app on your phone. ECG recordings also appear on your phone, alongside detailed sleep tracking data.

Although my Android phone and Apple Watch are now more closely connected than they’ve ever been, the experience unfortunately isn’t as polished as I hoped, especially for a paid service. For starters, every notification my Apple Watch receives is through the Merge app rather than appearing as a native watchOS notification, so it almost feels like you’re opening an app within an app just to check or respond to your notifications.

All other apps installed on your Apple Watch still work independently: only the Merge Watch app transfers notifications and acts as a shared experience between the two devices. It’s actually more of a notification mirroring, because unlike the iPhone, which automatically decides whether a notification appears on your phone or watch, your Android phone still issues notifications even when you’re actively using your Apple Watch. I guess this is the best a third party developer can do given the limitations set by Apple.

Although you’re trusting a third-party app with access to some pretty sensitive health information and data, Merge Watch’s privacy policy claims that most of the data stays on your devices and that when notifications are sent via an internet relay, they are end-to-end encrypted. The hardest pill to swallow is its subscription model. There are two tiers to choose from, but to unlock the full features of the app you’ll need to pay $6 per month.

I tested the experiment with my iPhone turned off to see if I could actually drive my Apple Watch daily with an Android device. The results were a bit mixed. Merge Watch does not require your Apple Watch to be connected to the Internet. It delivers notifications primarily via Bluetooth. However, there are instances where the app just doesn’t give me a nudge on my wrist. You have to manually launch the app on the Apple Watch to get things working again. This sometimes results in my watch sending me a dozen times at once when the app finally wakes up.

I noticed slightly higher power consumption on my Apple Watch, which makes sense given that the app runs continuously in the background and fetches notifications all day. I ran this setup on watchOS 27 on an Apple Watch Series 10 connected to my OnePlus 15 running Android 16. OxygenOS has a reputation for aggressively pausing background activities in favor of endurance, and even with battery optimization turned off for Merge Watch, I couldn’t eliminate occasional notification lags.

Overall, Merge Watch is a pretty reliable service if you want to pair an Apple Watch with your Android device. While I would have much preferred a one-time payment rather than a monthly subscription, it’s hard to complain when there are virtually no effective alternatives.