Recently Google started to publish updates for their stock alarm app through the Play Store. They added some nice features like gradually increasing volume and better support for custom alarm ringtones. Compared to the stock app the newly published version contains enhanced support for Android Wear, namely a better synchronisation of alarms and the ability to snooze or dismiss alarms on your connected Android Wear watch.

While most of these features are pretty useful, two things are pretty annoying: Alarms on your phone also go off on your watch, even if it sits on the charging dock. And there’s no way to disable vibration on the watch for alarms. This is pretty annoying if you charge your watch on the nightstand beside your bed and use the app to get up in the morning: The phone, watch and nightstand will vibrate so loudly that you could think somebody drills a hole in the wall next to your head.

There seems to be no easy way to fix this problem. Disabling vibration on the phone does nothing, setting the watch into theater mode won’t help either. Some people suggest workarounds like using another alarm app or disabling bluetooth altogether. Downgrading to the stock version doesn’t work for Android Marshmallow anymore, since the new version is included with the OS.

I found a workaround that is a good compromise for me: You can disable a service on your phone that synchronizes the alarm clock on the phone with the watch. This will stop the alarm from going off on the watch, but also all other new Android Wear features Google added to their alarm app.

Method 1 (the easy one):

You’ll need:

  • A rooted phone. Rooting the watch is not required.
  • An app that can disable Android services. Disable Service works well.

Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Open the Disable Service app.
  2. Navigate to the System tab
  3. Choose the Clock app
  4. Remove the check box from “WearableSyncService”

Method 2 (the harder one):

You’ll need:

  • A rooted phone. Rooting the watch is not required.
  • A computer with a running ADB installation. The easiest way is to install the Android SDK.
  • USB debugging enabled on your phone. See this link for more information.

Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Open a terminal on your computer
  2. Run the following ADB command: adb shell su -c "pm disable com.google.android.deskclock/com.android.deskclock.WearableSyncService"

That’s it, no more vibrating of your watch if an alarm on your phone goes off.