After a week of emails and a few conversations I have finally received an email back from Google Play support. The email gave me a 24 hour time sensitive offer to accept a free replacement LG G Watch. I wouldn’t need to pay for postage to return old phone and also I would receive the new watch before sending back the corroded one.

Sounds fair? Not really as the question I asked was whether there was any change in design or anything else that would stop this from happening with a replacement. This question was completely ignored.

So another call to Google support and with a response time of 24-48 hours indicated.

To be continued.

Update. The watch just received a firmware update to 4.4w. Build kmv78y. This is meant to be an update that stops the pins corroding somehow. Yet Google new nothing of this update and this was a specialist support person.