Android watch programming - Overview

    Using Android wearables, you can write applications for Android TV, Watch and glass applications - this article focuses on Android variables for SmartWatch. 

Since Wearables is built on top of Android most of the core features in Android works on Android watch as well. Using android Watch API you can create applicatins for different watch sizes such as round dial, or a square Dial Watch. Apart from creating the watch face you can also create notifications, synchronize data with the watch - send and receive data. 

The notifications that comes for the apps in the mobile is also received by the watch. If you close the message on one device, the message gets removed on the other device as well. 

 What can you do using an Android watch

• Your phone notifications such as meeting, traffic update, weather update, music, reminders are automatically synched with Android watch.
• You can control actions on your notifications / pages – such as open the meeting on the meeting notification or play/pause your music app from your watch.
• Use voice commands to ask questions, initiate app, send / reply to an email, create meetings right from your watch – just like you do using your phone.

What can you do using Android wear API:

•  Make applications for round and square structured watches.
• Create new watch faces
•  Act on wearable notifications
•  Use voice message as an action.
• Build Notification messages.
• Send and receive data from/to the phone/ tablet using the Data layer API and the message API. This allows you to communicate with your phone wirelessly over Bluetooth
• Detect location data on watches.

Basic Design principles:

• Performance in loading the watch page: This should not take more than a couple of seconds as the user is not going to hold the wrist to see the page if it takes more than a couple of seconds. Hence avoid rich data and concentrate on the data that is going to be shown.
• Do not cram the screen with too much information.
•  Keep the android screen type in mind – round or square and design accordingly.
•   Keep notifications to the minimum in case of watch. Show only important and required information in the watch. Use suggest notifications.
• Omit too much text – use icons to convey what you want. For example you can display a cloud with snowy icon to show the weather status as snowy instead of the text “snowy”.
• \Provide confirmation notifications whenever required. The user should know what he did what happened to the action he performed.
•  Since wearable devices run on Bluetooth low energy devices, developers need to ensure they design the applications in such a way to not affect the battery. You have to consider the battery closely when 

            - you design watch faces and the data in them, how often they get refreshed

            - you use location based features.