Someone Just Booted Windows On A Pixel Watch, And It Actually (Kind Of) Works

A man pressed the digital crown of his Google Pixel Watch 3.

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

TL;DR

Windows on Arm supports processors just like the ones found in most smartphones and wearables.
One engineer decided to have some fun with his Pixel Watch 3 by hacking it to boot Windows instead of Wear OS.
While utterly impractical and of extremely limited utility, in the end it actually runs.

April is here, and for a few more hours at least, that means you largely can’t trust anything you read. April Fools’ Day can be a lot of fun, absolutely, but navigating it can require a lot of attention if you’ve got any hope of telling all the real stuff apart from the fake stuff. On one hand, that makes this an incredibly risky time of year to announce anything even vaguely “weird,” but one engineer is instead embracing today as the perfect time to share his own wacky, hard-to-believe project: getting Windows to run on a Pixel Watch 3.

PhD student Gustave Monce details his work towards getting Windows for Arm running on the Pixel Watch 3’s quad-core Snapdragon processor and tiny 456×456 OLED display. Qualcomm’s UEFI-based XBL bootloader offers a jumping off point, and after a whole lot of configuration editing and table patching, Monce was able to coax the wearable into booting the Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) — sure, you can just see the blue background here, but Monce explains all his work so we’re going to take his word for it.

So far, things were progressing nicely, if not without a few hiccups along the way, but then Google released Android 15 for the Watch 3, which subtly managed to break the way Monce was loading his code. A few hours later, though, and following some very hacky modifications to the stock kernel image, the Pixel Watch 3 was once again (barely) booting into Windows PE. Monce has even been able to get very limited USB support working, but so far only for mass storage.

This is far from a complete, usable solution, but even this proof of concept makes for a really cool reminder of just how powerful and flexible the compact mobile hardware we carry around with us really is. Sure, you may never have a proper Windows experience on a smartwatch, but that’s not going to be because the silicon’s not up to the task.

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