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How FotMob leveraged cross-device discovery to score record Wear OS adoption
FotMob, a popular football platform, experienced a significant increase in Wear OS installations recently. This surge, 2-3 times higher than usual, was driven by a cross-device installation flow. The key was enabling users to discover and install the Wear OS app directly from the phone app. The team realized many users with Wear OS devices were unaware of the watch app. They used Android's Wearable library to identify connected Wear OS devices. The phone app checked for the Wear OS app's absence before prompting installation. A user-friendly prompt with a Wear OS app screenshot allowed users to initiate the install. The RemoteActivityHelper API launched the Play Store on the watch for installation. The Wearable APIs made this implementation of functionality relatively easy. This simple strategy led to over 1,500 new watch app installs within two days. FotMob's success showed the need for cross-device awareness and seamless installation. Google has now launched the In-App Install Prompts library to ease such implementations further. Developers can now easily create similar cross-device journeys for their apps.