We all know the pain of returning from work and lying down lazily on the couch, feeling like watching the latest shows, only to realize that you left the TV remote somewhere. As frustrating as it might be to fetch the remote, you’d wish there was an easy way to magically control your TV. What if we told you there is? Enter WowMouse, an app that was recently updated to support more gestures, exactly what you’d need in this scenario.
What is WowMouse?
For those unaware, we covered WowMouse on Apple Watch at CES 2025 and its ability to turn your smartwatch into a fully-fledged mouse. The app first launched for Wear OS a long time ago, and I mentioned it in my best Wear OS apps list. Although I faced a few jitters when I first tried it, my experience was mostly positive. Fast-forward a few years and the mouse functionality has improved tremendously.
The developer recently added many new gestures and features as a part of the Pro subscription. This includes the ability to skip, go to previous track, pause, and play media, and quickly switch presets to switch between gestures and mouse.
All these features can be unlocked by purchasing the Pro version of the app, which we bought as I was extremely intrigued. It costs $4.99 for lifetime, which is pretty affordable.
WowMouse Pro Gesture Control in Practice
Setting up the app is pretty smooth. The app makes your smartwatch discoverable as a Bluetooth device. After this, you can use your PC, another phone, or tablet to connect to the same.
Once connected, you can tap on the cogwheel icon, where you can find options to reassign various gestures for different modes. You can have both taps and flicks enabled and set the sensitivity for them.
WowMouse gives you three modes in the Pro version — Mouse, Arrow keys, and Media controls. It’s extremely simple to set up and makes navigating your devices easy once you get a hold of its functions.
So, let’s consider a classic scenario where you’re watching TV and you want to control the same using your smartwatch. If you previously connected the smartwatch to the TV, you can pull up the available devices on WowMouse and select your TV to connect. You can then use the arrow keys to navigate and use media controls to skip, go back, pause, and play. Now how cool is that!
While I didn’t have an Android TV, I connected the app to my phone instead and started watching YouTube. The gestures on my Galaxy Watch 7 worked brilliantly, with very little to complain about.
The volume controls with pinch and flick up/down worked phenomenally well too. Similarly, you can deactivate the mouse with a flick of your wrist and activate it again whenever you want.
I did notice one caveat. When I tried fiddling with the customization options trying to go to the next reel/short, I could only scroll through portions of them. I wasn’t able to play them. I tried using the media controls and arrow buttons as well, but to no avail. However, I managed to get it to work by assigning a gesture to Left-click and then tried swiping up. But doing so was a chore, and it didn’t function most of the time.
How WowMouse Leverages Your Smartwatch’s Sensors
WowMouse makes great use of your Wear OS or Apple Watch’s sensors. All it needs to work is to connect the watch via Bluetooth to TVs, Phones, PCs. And it will work regardless of the operating system. In an hour or so I spent using the app, it did have a learning curve. However, the built-in tutorials made it a bit easier to learn.
Initially, I had lots of trouble switching tracks via my Pixel Watch 2 on YouTube Music. The flicks would rarely register (3/10 accuracy) and there was a surprising bit of lag involved. Curious, I tried the app on my Galaxy Watch 7 and the accuracy was much better (8/10).
Now, I wasn’t sure if it has something to do with the app not being optimized for the Watch 2 or my hands being a little too big for the app to spot movements for the gestures to register; I believed the latter might very well be the case. After all, the Pixel Watch 2 is smaller than Watch 7, which means smaller surface area and less accurate gesture detection.
Curious, I reached out to the creator of the app, Simon Frübis, and he confirmed my suspicion.
If the watch is either too small or too big for the wrist, the gesture detection gets a bit worse. We assume that people have a watch that fits their wrist.
That said, he also pointed me to some presets in the documentation that I tried out. While it did improve the gesture detection, it was a far cry from the immaculate gesture tracking on the Galaxy Watch 7. The docs will be updated soon for better tracking, so I’ll hold my breath.
Device and Platform Compatibility
WowMouse works with most Wear OS 2 and above devices, including all Wear OS Galaxy Watches, Pixel Watch 2, and Watch 3. Unfortunately, Pixel Watch 1 isn’t supported because the gesture detection algorithm does not perform well on it. WowMouse is also supported on Apple Watch SE, Series 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and Watch Series Ultra 1, 2.
As for platform compatibility, WowMouse works with Windows 10, 11, Android, ChromeOS, Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android TV, Kobo, Boox, Samsung DEX, and Horizon OS. However, it doesn’t work on Kindle and Apple TV yet.
Overall, it’s a solid piece of software that gets everything right. It’s highly customizable, pretty accurate, and feature-packed. It feels like Android’s IR blaster-equivalent but for Wear OS. Besides, it shows the massive untapped potential of gestures on Wear OS.
The folks over at Doublepoint were generous enough to share 15 redemption codes for WowMouse Pro, which you can find in this X post. You can redeem these codes on the Google Play Store (website). To give everyone a fair chance, we request you to only redeem them if you own a smartwatch and one that supports WowMouse. Please be mindful that the codes are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
What are your thoughts on WowMouse? Let us know in the comments below.
