Creating Wear OS watch faces just got easier

At in the present day’s I/O developer convention, Google introduced normal updates to the Android Put on platform, together with Put on OS 4, in addition to a brand new means for builders to create Put on OS watch faces.

With this replace, builders now achieve entry to a brand new notification format to design and create their very own watch faces utilizing the Jetpack Watch Face library when creating watch faces for Put on OS 4 watches. As a result of the brand new format is predicated on this library, builders will routinely make the most of any updates to this library, together with future efficiency and battery enhancements.

For the reason that new format is mainly simply an XML file, there isn’t any longer any executable code concerned in creating these new watch faces. Due to this fact, no code can be embedded within the watch face APK.

Utilizing the brand new library, builders will be capable of create the identical kind of watch faces as earlier than, similar to customary analog and digital watch faces or extra customizable ones, with or with out complexity. For the reason that watch face editor is now a part of Put on OS, builders who wish to create these customizable watch faces will not have to create their very own editors for them.

Samsung has already built-in this new format as a part of it. Watch Face Studio.

Android Put on/Put on OS did not have a really promising begin when it was first launched in 2014. For the longest time, it has been overshadowed by Apple’s Watch OS (though it was launched virtually precisely a yr later) and felt prefer it was the most effective. Staying across the Android ecosystem. Throughout this time, it was slowly pushed ahead by the dogged ecosystem of producers round it, and solely actually did properly when Samsung switched from its personal Tizen working system a number of years in the past. Now that Google’s Pixel Watch is available on the market, there’s a good stronger incentive for Google to innovate on this house.