Google halts Wear OS 5 rollout following Pixel Watch soft-bricking reports

Google kicked off the Wear OS 5 update rollout for the older Pixel smartwatches just a few days ago. Unfortunately, the Mountain View company had to pull the update because some users had their Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2 wearables soft brick.

The folks at 9to5google noticed that the Wear OS 5 update is no longer available for download, so if you heading to Settings / System / System update to try and download it, chances are that the device won’t return any results.

However, it looks like Google hasn’t yet delisted the factory and OTA images for the Wear OS 5, so the update can still be manually installed, although that requires a little bit of technical knowledge.

It’s worth mentioning that only a small percentage of Pixel Watch and Watch 2 users have been hit with these major issues. The problem that are facing while trying to install the update is a very black screen with a Bluetooth logo at the bottom during the process.

With the smartwatches stuck on this black screen, there’s only one fix that basically requires users to reset the device and go through the set-up process once again.