15 September 2021
Posted by Jeremy Walker, Engineer
In order to help you develop high quality Wear OS apps, we have been busy updating the Android Jetpack Wear OS libraries and recently delivered the first five stable Jetpack Wear OS libraries:
| Library | Featured functionality |
| wear | Lay out elements in an arch to support round watches (ArcLayout) and write curved text following the curvature of a device (CurvedText). |
| wear-input | Identify and interact with hardware buttons on the Wear OS device. |
| wear-ongoing | Surface Ongoing Notifications in new Wear specific surfaces (code lab). |
| wear-phone-interactions | Detect the type of phone a watch is paired with (iOS or Android) and handle all Notification bridging options. |
| wear-remote-interaction | Open Android intents on other devices, for example, when a user wants the app on both the phone and watch, open the Play Store on a device where your app isn't installed. |
The Android Jetpack Wear OS libraries contain all the familiar functionality you’ve grown used to in the old Wearable Support library, better support for Wear OS 3.0, and the features listed above (many of which are written 100% in Kotlin).
As always with Android Jetpack, the new Wear OS libraries help you follow best practices, reduce boilerplate, and create performant, glanceable experiences for your users.
The core stable libraries are available now. The Watch Face and Complications libraries are in alpha and will be released as stable later this year. Once that launches, the Wearable Support Library will officially be deprecated.
We strongly recommend you migrate the libraries within your Wear OS apps from the Wearable Support library to their AndroidX equivalents as we make them available in stable.
Note: The Android Jetpack libraries are meant to be replacements for the Wearable Support Libraries and aren't designed to be used together.
Try them out and let us know what you think!
Thank you!