I have scoured the internet and I am unable to find a good reason as to why Tasker or other home automation apps cannot read NFC tags on wearable devices (I am interested in wearos).
The most common explanation I have read is that wearOS and watchOS do not expose the NFC API to third party apps and is reserved for the respective pay/wallet apps, or the impact on battery life.
I use the chargepoint app to charge my car and when I get to a station all I have to do is put my watch up to the NFC section of the station and it authenticates and starts the charge session. I would love to do this for my home automations as well. Can someone help me understand why chargepoint can do it but an app like hubitat cannot?
Is that anything to do with hubitat? Sure the ability to read/react to NFC tags is wholly within the watch itself? Hubitat doesnt natively understand NFC afaik.
I use tasker and NFC tags to set HSM when I leave the house, but it's on my phone. I set it up using a local endpoint to trigger hubitat, but there are other ways i could have done it.
You need some way to get the watch to trigger hubitat. Tasker is an obvious choice, but i doubt it runs on a watch. Maybe thetes a low-power alternative?
Now in 2025 we are up to WearOS 5 but the watch still does not expose itself as an NFC reader.
NFC software support in the Wear OS is being purposely limited to host card emulation by Google as noted on this issue tracker: NFC Tag read API not working The host card emulation mode is basically enabling the watch to act as a credit card at POS terminals, which it does quite conveniently.
But it's a bummer because I bought a bag of adhesive NFC tags in hopes of using them to automate stuff around my house when my Google Pixel Watch 3 comes into proximity of them. My Pixel 7 phone is able to write those tags and read them back to trigger automations just fine. But as the issue tracker notes, the watch does not respond, even though I have successfully side-loaded and run both NFC Tools and its companion NFC Tasks on the watch.
