Samsung’s amazing Gear 3 smartwatch now has an official iOS app (update)

It’s been a long-time coming, and long rumored, but it’s finally here: Today Samsung pushed live its iOS app for the company’s high-end Gear S2 and S3 smartwatches.

The Samsung Gear S app delivers support, tracking for the watch as well as the ability to download and install watch faces and apps directly from the Gear store. This makes the Gear watches one of the first major non-Apple smartwatches to come to the iPhone with robust support.

Currently, the only smartwatch with full support for the iPhone is Apple’s own Apple Watch. The bulk of smartwatches run on Android Wear, which is designed for Android devices. Google’s Android Wear does have an iOS app but it does little more than offer up a small number of watch faces and notification support. It leaves behind the robust line-up of apps created for Android.

Brian Crecente | Polygon

Samsung was able to do this because its watch doesn’t run on WatchOS or Android, but on Tizen, and has its own store.

The app appears to include support for a large number of watch faces as well as quite a wide variety of watch apps, like CNN, Flipbook and Yelp.

We’ll have a full review of the new iOS app later this month as part of our review of the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier smartwatch.

In the meantime, make sure you check out our guide to the best smartwatches of 2016.

Update: Google officials reached out to point out that Android Wear 2.0 will allow iOS users to download apps from the new Google Play store directly to a supported watch. Google has not yet announced a date for Android Wear 2.0, but did say it was continuing the preview program into early 2017.

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