Author/developer relations Engineer Jeremy Walker

This year’s Android Developer Summit brought a lot of exciting news for Android developers, including some major updates to the Wear OS platform. We announced the new Wear OS at Google I/O. Since then, we have introduced The Samsung powered Wear OS on the Galaxy Watch4 series. Several developers, including Strava, Spotify and Calm, have built a number of practical experiences for the latest version of Wear OS, and we’re looking forward to seeing what the developers bring to the watch. To learn more about building great apps for your watch, read more about apis, design tools and updates to the Play Store.

Compose for Wear OS

The Jetpack Compose library simplifies and speeds up UI development, and we’re working on bringing Compose support to Wear OS. UI components are now available for watches, and you can use familiar components to design applications. Material You is one of them, allowing You to build beautiful applications with less code.

Compose for Wear OS is now available in developer preview. You are welcome to learn more and start using:

  • Compose for Wear OS
  • Read the Wear OS version of Compose overview for more details.
  • Use the Quick Start guide to build your first app.
  • GitHub examples (from easy to hard).

Experience and share your feedback now, or join Jetbrains Slack’s # comement-Wear to share it with us! Please submit your feedback before we complete the Beta version of the API!

Watch Face Studio

Watch face themes are one of the most visible ways users express themselves on smartwatches. Creating a watch face theme is a great way to showcase your brand on Wear OS. We’ve partnered with Samsung to provide better tools to help you more easily design your watch face themes for the Wear OS ecosystem.

The Watch Face Studio design tool from Samsung lets you create and publish your own Watch Face themes without writing any code. The tool includes intuitive and easy-to-use graphics tools to help you easily design the dial theme. You can create a watch face theme for private use only or upload it to the Google Play Administration to share with your users on Wear OS devices that support API level 28 and above.

Development library update

We’ve recently released a number of Android Jetpack Wear OS development libraries to help you reference best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and provide a high-performance, in-your-face experience for your users.

Most devices on the market today are enabled with Tiles, providing predictable and intuitive access to information and fast manipulation. The API is currently in beta, and you are welcome to visit the official documentation for more information.

For developers who want fine-tuning of the Watch Face theme (outside of Watch Face Studio), we’re launching a new Jetpack Watch Face API Beta built by Kotlin.

Some new features of the new API are as follows:

  • Watch face theme style that can be retained permanently on watches and mobile phones (without using your own database).
  • Support the WYSIWYG theme configuration UI on mobile phones.
  • Smaller stand-alone libraries (containing only the libraries you need).
  • Encourage the use of preset good battery usage patterns to improve battery life; For example, reduce the interactive frame rate when the battery is low.
  • Launched a new Screenshot API that lets users see changes in their screen theme in real time.
  • There are more features to come…

Now is the perfect time to migrate from the old dial Theme support library to this new release.

Play Store Update

We are working to make it easier for users to discover your Wear OS apps in the Google Play Store. Earlier this year, we enabled the dial Subject search feature to make it easier for users to find your app in the Wear category. We also announced features that allow users to download apps directly from the Mobile Play store to the watch. You can check out the official documentation to learn more about these changes.

We’ve also released a new Wear OS quality guide to help you meet your users’ expectations, as well as a new screen capture guide to help users better understand the styles you’re applying. To help users better understand how your app works on devices in their location, we will introduce device type and location-specific scoring in 2022.

For more information on Wear OS development, check out the developer website. You are also welcome to continue to follow the “Android Developer “wechat official account to learn more about the latest content.

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