Mirror phone on WearOS

[SamGreenwood1]

What problem does this address?

Convenience

What is your proposed solution?

Mirror queue from phone to watch like Spotify does.

Did you search for existing feature suggestions?

• [X] I have searched for existing feature suggestions.

[mchowning]

👍 We definitely want to add this both for the additional convenience and to enable our free users to use the watch app.

[joashrajin]

+1 in 6461211-zd-woothemes

The Pocket Casts Wear app isn't really usable for me as I want to keep the podcasts on my phone, not download them to my watch. I just want to control podcast playback on my phone, from my watch

[joashrajin]

+1 6569729-zd-woothemes

[erebion]

I just want to control podcast playback on my phone, from my watch

Isn't that what the media controls in WearOS are for?

Did that request specify anything more other than play/pause and changing volume? 🤔

[revanmj]

I guess more (I would understand it that way) like choose podcast and its episode to play (but on the phone, with only controls on the watch) like in case of Spotify.

Also, I don't know if media controls on Wear OS support custom actions like playback speed and moving 10/30 seconds back and forth.

[joashrajin]

Is it possible to start a podcast from my phone and control it using my watch because it doesn't seem to be working it's going reverting to the default wearOS media player which is pretty bad.

7364326-zd-a8c

[sibbl]

Isn't that what the media controls in WearOS are for?

Did that request specify anything more other than play/pause and changing volume? 🤔

I just stumbled upon this issue because I cannot skip x seconds back or forth by using my watch. The default media controls do have next/prev buttons but both are grayed out and disabled.

I'd be happy with either solution: supporting this via media controls (I'd even prefer that) OR allowing it via Pocket Casts app. Not sure if it's worth another issue perhaps?

It's also possible that I missed some setting to get the prev/next buttons working somehow. While my previous Fitbit Sense used the Bluetooth media control API, this seems to be different for Wear OS to which I'm quite new.

[SamGreenwood1]

When I first published this issue, I didn't realize that Spotify treats the WearOS device as its own Spotify Connect device. So it would require much more work to create a version of PC with that feature set.

[CookieyedCodes]

When I first published this issue, I didn't realize that Spotify treats the WearOS device as its own Spotify Connect device. So it would require much more work to create a version of PC with that feature set.

Eh they will get to it eventually 😅

[joashrajin]

I use the Google Pixel 2 smartwatch and notice I'm unable to skip back or skip forward while podcast is playing on my phone. Take a look at the attached screenshot of the media controls screen on my watch while playing a podcast using pocket casts and you'll see the previous and next buttons are greyed out. Ideally, I'd like to tap the skip back or skip forward buttons to control playback without having to pull out my phone.

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[mchowning]

There are two separate issues at play here.

The first is that the Pocket Casts watch app performs playback independently from the phone, and we want to give our watch app the ability to mirror and control Pocket Casts on the phone (i.e., not just playback, but also things like updating the queue). This is functionality that the iOS watch app has for free users and we want to bring it to Android as well.

The second issue is when playing Pocket Casts on the phone it is not possible to skip forward and back using the Wear OS's built-in media controls as described in this issue. This issue likely has nothing to do with the Pocket Casts Wear OS app as this functionality should be able to work even if Pocket Casts is not installed on the watch since it relates to the phone app and the Android media session.

[DanGMI86]

Here's the thing: the media controls in WearOS v.2 worked just fine on my Fossil Gen5. Would open Pocket Cast on my phone and the media controls auto-launched on the watch, controlled the playback from the version on the phone, no problem at all. Did not have to d/ to watch or any of that stuff being indicated here, controlled the same instance of the podcast from either the phone or watch interchangeably. I just moved to Pixel Watch 2, so also to Wear OS 3 and now the controls are broken. The media controls are all present on the watch, but only play/pause and volume work. Cannot skip ahead or back. To me it appears that they have not updated their stuff to the new Wear version.

[joashrajin]

My watch just updated to Wear OS 3 and now I don't have the ability to skip forward or back in the OS 3 media controls. The icons are greyed out and do nothing. It appears there have been other people looking for help in the last few years but I haven't seen any solutions that can be implemented on the user end. According to your GitHub this seems to have been fixed but it's not working on my Ticwatch Pro 3 with Pocket Casts like it should be as demonstrated with YouTube Music.

The user has added the following details:

Watchmaker watch faces were a workaround to the issue with the Android Media Controls app but I'm having independent problems with Watchmaker now. I was able to find some other apps to work around the problem though (SimpleWear and Media Controller Pro).

I've come to the conclusion that Media Controls for Wear OS 3 is only looking for the availability of next/previous controls, which are distinct from skip forward/skip backward controls. So as Pocket Casts is only offering forward/backward, Media Controls doesn't provide the ability to skip. I encountered the same problem playing podcasts instead of songs on YouTube Music. It would be helpful for Pocket Casts to provide a workaround for this issue but it's ultimately a design issue with Media Controls. I did try installing Pocket Casts on the watch, but it's not designed to function as a remote control but as an independent player.

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[joashrajin]

7705331-zd-a8c

[rpardee]

I just stumbled upon this issue because I cannot skip x seconds back or forth by using my watch. The default media controls do have next/prev buttons but both are grayed out and disabled.

This is the whole issue for me. I don't necessarily want to change my queue or whatever--I just want to be able to skip commercials while I'm listening in the shower ;-)

I'd be willing to install the watch app if I had to to get this functionality, but IMHO the first-class solution would be for the standard media controls to work to skip X seconds backward or forth.

[joashrajin]

https://forums.pocketcasts.com/forums/topic/feature-request-android-wear-os-playback-control-with-android-device/?view=all#post-4091

[joashrajin]

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