Wear OS

What it is

Kinoku on Wear OS is a full watch app rather than a window onto your phone’s notifications. You can run a whole session from your wrist, and the watch holds the sets, the heart rate, and the timers itself. All of it finds its way back to the phone on its own once the two devices are near each other again.

What the watch handles

• Start a workout even when your phone is nowhere near you.
• Log sets with a tap or by turning the watch dial.
• Track heart rate for the whole session and save it into the workout.
• Track a run with pace, distance, and splits.
• Set a rest timer that buzzes your wrist when it runs out.
• Tap to start from a Wear OS tile, which is a quick screen you swipe to beside your watch face rather than something drawn on the face itself.
• Keep the session in view while you move between watch faces.

Steps and your recent runs stay on the wrist as well, and watch face slots can show them without opening anything.

One run, phone left at home

A long run with the phone left at home is the case this is built for. The watch records your pace, distance, and splits as you go, and it keeps your average and peak heart rate beside them. Walk back through the door and the finished session appears on the phone with nothing for you to press. None of that run needed the phone to be in the room.

Sync runs both ways

A workout you start on the watch turns up on the phone, and a workout you start on the phone turns up on the watch. The two catch each other up the moment they are close again, so training with the phone in a locker costs you nothing in the record.

The waiting is worth naming as the limit here. Until the pair meet, the session lives on the watch alone, which leaves the phone’s history a step behind for as long as you stay apart.

The same look on both screens

Pick one of the themes the watch carries and it follows your phone, so the two screens match rather than clashing. The watch app is not a stripped-down cousin wearing different paint.

Free

The watch app is free, and there is no second charge for logging one workout on two screens. Kinoku is Android only, so the pairing here is an Android phone and a Wear OS watch. That has been the shape of it since the watch app shipped, and it stays that way.