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Google will release a custom watch face API for Android Wear soon, current watch faces may not...

Guest Robert Nazarian

By Guest Robert Nazarian
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Guest Robert Nazarian

Guest Robert Nazarian

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When Google released the Android Wear SDK at Google I/O a few weeks ago, we were told that custom watch faces weren’t supported. I was very disappointed, but very excited to actually see custom watch faces in the Play Store a week later. How was this possible? Well I am no developer, but there is some sort of workaround that is working pretty well.

 

Google’s Wayne Piekarski recently posted about this and mentioned that a custom watch API is in the works. He also notes…

 

 

Custom watch faces are activities running inside another process. However, they have some special considerations due to interactions with the stream and always-on ambient mode–including using a shorter peek card, moving the status indicators for battery and mute, and rendering the faces differently in ambient mode. Right now, without an official API, making a really great watch face currently takes a fair bit of tweaking.

 

Google’s API will make all of this more simpler while conserving battery and displaying the user’s card stream properly. This is all going to happen when Android L is released, which probably won’t be until October or so. So what happens in the meantime? Wayne is suggesting that developers not release their custom watch face apps into the Play Store and instead, post them to the appropriate alpha or beta channels. The biggest reason for this is the fact that custom watch faces that are created today might not work with the new API.

 

I just hope that Google’s API allows the full watch face to be shown in ambient mode (dimmed of course) because developers are able to do that now.

 

I would expect to still see watch faces in the Play Store, but we probably won’t see a big spike in growth until the fall. Android users love customization, and nobody wants to use the boring ones that are included on each watch until October.

 

source: +Wayne Piekarski

via: Ausdroid

 

 

Come comment on this article: Google will release a custom watch face API for Android Wear soon, current watch faces may not work with it

 

http://androidforum.us/data/MetaMirrorCache/c28bdb5dc3fb95a98189bacfbfad03bd._.gif

 

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