Android may soon sync Airplane Mode between your phone and watch

Most mobile devices feature a one-tap Airplane Mode that disables wireless radios. While designed to prevent interference with aircraft communications, many people also use the feature on the ground to preserve battery life.

Although enabling Airplane Mode is simple, Android phones and Wear OS watches don’t currently sync this state. You must remember to toggle it on both devices individually. If you forget one, your device may needlessly drain its battery searching for a cellular signal at 30,000 feet. To solve this, Google is working on a new setting that syncs Airplane Mode between your devices.

While digging through the recent 2511 Android Canary release, I spotted a new string in the Settings app. A string labeled airplane_mode_sync_description reads: “When connected by Bluetooth, Airplane mode will sync across the supported devices such as phone and watch.”

While the text cites phones and watches as examples, the feature appears specifically targeted at that pairing. The flag that controls it is explicitly named sync_airplane_mode_with_watches. Since this flag is disabled in the latest Canary build and the setting isn’t fully implemented, I couldn’t trigger the feature to capture a screenshot.

However, this feature is easy to visualize. Toggling Airplane Mode on your Android phone will trigger it on your connected Wear OS watch, or vice versa. This relies on the devices maintaining a Bluetooth connection, which is possible because Android can keep Bluetooth active even when Airplane Mode is turned on.

Google is clearly playing catch-up here, as the Apple Watch and iPhone have long synced Airplane Mode via the “Mirror iPhone” feature. Still, it’s great to see Google implementing new cross-device features, even if they aren’t the first to do so. I’m especially eager for the arrival of Android’s version of Apple’s Handoff, which promises to let you continue tasks from your phone on your tablet or PC.