Reliability

How reliable is replying from my watch?

Short answer: very. With Keep-Alive on and battery set to Unrestricted, conversations stay repliable for days at a time — in our testing we’ve seen 3+ days without a single token drop.

How it works

When someone messages you on Google Chat, WristMSG marks that conversation Ready (green) on your watch so you can reply instantly. Every new message in a conversation refreshes that Ready state, so threads you’re actively using stay available continuously.

What to expect

Active conversations stay Ready. As long as messages are flowing, you can keep replying from your wrist.
Quiet conversations stay Ready too. With the recommended settings below, conversations hold their Ready state even when no new messages arrive for days.

When a conversation shows “Needs Message” (orange)

This happens after:

your phone restarted (reply tokens are stored in RAM and don’t survive a reboot — no app can change this), or
an OEM battery manager force-killed the app despite the Unrestricted setting (some aggressive OEM task killers bypass Android’s standard battery APIs).

The fix is automatic: the next message in that conversation makes it Ready again. Nothing is lost — an idle conversation just needs one fresh message to re-arm. You’ll never send to the wrong place; a “Needs Message” contact simply can’t be replied to from the watch until it re-arms.

Get the most reliable experience

Two settings make the biggest difference:

1. Turn on Keep-Alive

In WristMSG: Settings → Reliability → Keep Tokens Alive.

Always On — most reliable; runs a small background service with a quiet notification.
While Charging — a good balance; keeps conversations ready overnight when most phones are on the charger.

2. Set battery to “Unrestricted” — for BOTH apps

On phones with aggressive battery management, the system can force-stop apps in the background. Setting both apps to Unrestricted prevents this.

Do this for both apps:

Settings → Apps → WristMSG → Battery → Unrestricted
Settings → Apps → Google Chat → Battery → Unrestricted

With Keep-Alive on and both apps set to Unrestricted, conversations should stay repliable for days — the only remaining interruptions are phone restarts and, on a small number of phones, OEM task killers that go beyond Android’s standard battery controls.