Moving your Pixel Watch to a new phone is easy once you know where to look

Last night, I needed to help a friend set up his Pixel Watch on his new Pixel 8. He had recently upgraded to the Pixel 8 from the Pixel 7 and knew there was supposed to be a way to simply move the watch from one phone to the other with little hassle since the Wear OS 4 update. I also thought this was the case, but I’d yet to actually do this since I don’t wear a Pixel Watch any longer.

And at first, I wasn’t really sure how to proceed. After a little bit of research, however, I learned how to pull this off with no need to reset the Pixel Watch, and in the end, the entire process was pretty quick, seamless and easy to do. You just need to know where to look in order to get things rolling. So if you found this while searching for that exact thing, you’ve come to the right place.

Set your Pixel Watch up to make the transfer

First up, you need to get your watch in the right mode to begin the transfer. It’s easy enough; just head to Settings > System > Transfer watch and your Pixel Watch will then be ready and looking for a new phone to pair up with. You’ll now be prompted to open up the Pixel Watch app on the phone you want to move to.

Open the Pixel Watch app on your new phone

On the new phone, open the Pixel Watch app and it will walk you through the connection process from start to finish. There’s not much to do, really, besides getting signed in and confirming a pairing code that will show up. Once complete, the app will let you know that things are transferred and your Pixel Watch should automatically unpair from the old phone as well.

Sit back and relax

That’s quite literally it. There may be a few things that take a bit to sync between the Pixel Watch and the app, but it only takes a few minutes to be up and running with your existing Pixel Watch on your new phone. While I thought Wear OS 4 would make this technically possible, I didn’t expect it to be so easy. Well done on this one, Google!