3 New Features for Android App Development Using Wear 2.0

Google’s operating system for smartwatches, the Android Wear will soon receive and update for the 2.0 version and the preview was made at the Google I/O 2016.

After recommendations from the developers’ community, a more or less final version of the product has been released for full-swing Android app development. We bring the 3 new features of the Android Wear 2.0.

Platform API 24

The platform API version has been upgraded to version 24 to match Android Nougat. The Android Wear 2.0 Preview project’s compileSDKversion and targetSDKVersion can be updated to API 24.

The new features will enhance the wrist gestures to enhance user experience. The APIs offer new watch face complications, live background options, music album art option and much more.

Wearable Drawers Enhancement

Wearable drawers come with new UX guidelines for integrating navigation drawer and action drawer on the Android Wear app. New features will have additional support for wearable drawer peeking which will facilitate easy access to drawers as users scroll.

There are other UI improvements such as automatic peek view and navigation drawer closure. It also shows the first action in WearableActionDrawer’s peek view.

For additional customization in the wearable drawers, peek_view and drawer_content attributes have been added to WearableDrawerView. The navigation drawer contents can be updated by calling notifyDataSetChanged.

Wrist Gestures

Android app developers can now access the feature to scroll through the notification stream via wrist gestures for their applications. The aim is to improve single hand usage experience making the smartwatch handier for multi-tasking.

The new version is still in development phase and the new version can be accessed on the Android Wear website. In spite of the bug fixes and changes, there are some issues that still need to be addressed, such as –

• “ok Google” detection and voice transcription are still not reliable
• Turning off screen lock functionality is unreliable
• Dismissing multiple notifications can force close the app
• Double pressing power button while on launcher causes blackout on watch screen
• There is no support for notification groups on the preview version

The version 2.0 will include standalone apps that can be downloaded directly on the Watch via the Google Play Store. For OLED watch displays, a redefined circular user interface with a dark background can be downloaded. After release, the 2.0 version will be available on the newer smartwatch versions.

Solution Analysts offers the whole range of mobile application development services, and we are testing the version 2.0 to create hands-free solutions for our applications. To know more about our services, get in touch with us.