Among the growing market of smart watches and wearable devices, the Samsung Galaxy Gear is probably one of the more prominent names. It is, after all, from one of the most success Android device manufacturers. So its a bit of a dampener when Samsung decided to restrict the Galaxy Gear to only the owners of the few compatible Galaxy devices such as the Note 3, Note 10.1 and the S4.

This didn't hold back XDA Forum Member pcelli from getting the Galaxy Gear to work on the Nexus 5 however, and he shared the method on the XDA forums for other owners of non-Samsung devices to try out. The process is quite simple, though it may take some time. It essentially involves installing the gearmanagerstub.apk, extracting the various APK files from gear manager 1.6 111801.apk, and manually installing them one-by-one onto your device.

Gathering from the community response, it seems like devices running AOSP-derived Android 4.4.2 ROMs are having some luck with the process, such as the HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z1. An issue that's appearing to be consistent among all these devices is the failure to run 'Weather' and 'S Voice,' and this may be because both features are TouchWiz based.

It should be kept in mind that this loophole is not guaranteed to run on your device, and there's the possibility that a future Galaxy Gear update will patch this up, so it may not be a wise idea to rush out and buy one simply because of this loophole. But if you happen to have a Galaxy Gear and a non-compatible device on your table, or if you're interested in the details, check out the original thread.