From today, Samsung Gear and Galaxy Apps will be consolidated into a single store

Those of you with a Samsung smartwatch may have noticed a major change to the way that Samsung is handling wearable apps today. The company has announced that its Gear Apps store will now be merged with the main Galaxy Apps shop, so that customers can find all their Samsung related downloads under a single roof.

The Gear app store was Samsung’s main hub for smartwatch related software, with downloads ranging from watch faces to third party apps. The main reason for the merger appears to be to simplify the user experience, so that customers don’t have to hop between two different platforms.

The dedicated Gear app isn’t going to completely disappear though. It will still function as a connected hub for smartwatches, but customers will be pulled over to the main Galaxy Apps store if they want to install apps or other downloads for their watch or fitness tracker.

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To ease customers into the new integration, Samsung is making a selection of Gear S2 watch faces available for free. There is also now a dedicated Gear tab in the main store that can be used to find apps and the like, and Samsung says that it has improved its search function to help make finding smartwatch related content easier.

An update notification should pop up the next time that you open up the Galaxy Apps store, which will apply the changes. How do you feel about the integration?