Gboard is broken in some Wear OS apps

Wear OS 4 made it to many of our favorite Android smartwatches a couple of months ago with a few noticeable inclusions like better battery optimization and native apps for Gmail and Google Calendar. Samsung even brought the latest update to its oldest Wear OS smartwatch models within a few weeks. While Google’s smartwatch OS has a few bugs that you can fix quite easily, this recent Wear OS issue is breaking Gboard in certain apps, and it appears to be affecting a lot of users.

A bunch of users took to Reddit and Google’s community help center to report about their Android smartwatches acting up while using Gboard on the latest Wear OS version. On Samsung watches, if you switch the default keyboard on your smartwatch from Samsung’s first-party option to Gboard, this peculiar little bug keeps Gboard from appearing when using a handful of apps, including one from Google.

A blank page appears (right) as soon as you click on ‘Create note’ in Google Keep

In apps like Google Keep and TickTick, when you open a new note (or anywhere else the qwerty keyboard is required in the app), the screen instantly goes blank, leaving the users with no way to input the text. Just to be clear, neither the app nor the watch freezes at this point; it’s just the keyboard that doesn’t appear on the screen — even the buttons and the touch gestures continue to work as usual, letting you go back to the previous screen or jump to the watch face.

This issue first surfaced on the Galaxy Watch 6, which came preloaded with Wear OS 4 based on One UI 5 about two months ago. The subsequent Wear OS releases to older Galaxy watches brought the same bug to the Galaxy Watch 4 and 5 as well, according to several users reporting it on online forums. We can also corroborate that, as our Galaxy Watch 4 Classic is also affected by the same issue.

It is worth noting that only a handful of apps are affected by this Gboard bug, and a Reddit user has fortunately put them together in a short list. The affected apps are: Bring, Google Keep, Samsung Alarm, Samsung Reminder, TickTick, Todoist, and Weargram. Considering most other mainstream apps aren’t affected, there is a good chance that these apps themselves are at fault instead of the OS or even the Gboard app for Wear OS. A Google product expert on its help community escalated the issue to the team, but we’ve yet to hear the exact cause for this from the company.

If you use one of the affected apps regularly on your Samsung smartwatch, the only way around the bug is to switch back to the Samsung keyboard for a better experience until the apps release a fix.