A proof-of-concept Wear OS app that bridges an iPhone's notifications and Now Playing media controls to a Google Pixel Watch over Bluetooth LE, using Apple's private-but-documented ANCS (Apple Notification Center Service) and AMS (Apple Media Service) protocols. The Pixel Watch has no official iPhone support — this exists because a $400 smartwatch bricking itself the moment you leave the Android ecosystem is silly.
Huge thanks to loud-at-heart for the AMS implementation!
Tested on: Google Pixel Watch 2. All BLE/ANCS/AMS behavior described below (including the workarounds for iOS-side quirks) was verified against a real Pixel Watch 2 paired to a real iPhone — not an emulator. Other Pixel Watch generations may behave differently.
- Notifications (ANCS): subscribes to the iPhone's Notification Center and mirrors incoming notifications (app, title, subtitle, message) as native Android notifications on the watch.
- Now Playing (AMS): subscribes to the iPhone's current media session and shows a live-updating control card — track title/artist, play/pause, and skip previous/next — that sends real remote-control commands back to the phone.
- Marquee text: track title/artist scroll only when they don't fit,
using Compose's
basicMarquee, so idle/short text never animates and never drains battery for no reason. - Self-healing Track metadata: iOS doesn't always resend the current track's title/artist when the watch (re)connects to a song that was already playing — a known AMS quirk. This app detects that stuck state (player reports "playing" but no track metadata ever arrived) and cycles the AMS Entity Update subscription to force iOS to push it again, instead of leaving the UI stuck.
- You'll need a Pixel Watch that's already been activated by an Android phone (the initial Wear OS setup requires Android; after that, this app handles the iPhone side).
- In the Pixel Watch's Bluetooth settings, manually pair it with your iPhone.
- Open this project in the latest Android Studio, build and install it on your Pixel Watch.
- On your iPhone, accept the prompt asking to share Notifications and Media Controls with the watch.
- Play something on your iPhone and open the app on the watch — the Now Playing card should show up with working controls. Text yourself to test notifications.
- Apple Notification Center Service (ANCS) specification
- Apple Media Service (AMS) — unofficial/reverse-engineered, no public Apple spec page; based on community documentation and BLE traffic captures.
- A lot of general BLE knowledge scattered across the internet that's impossible to properly cite at this point.