Book Image

Mastering Android Wear Application Development

By : Siddique Hameed, Javeed Chida
Book Image

Mastering Android Wear Application Development

By: Siddique Hameed, Javeed Chida

Overview of this book

Wearable technology is the future of mobile devices. It looks set to be a breakthrough technology, just like the iPad was before it. With the Apple Watch being widely regarded as a success, all eyes are now on Google to provide a similar device for its users. Keep your skills ahead of the competition and be one of the first to fully understand this powerful new trend. This book will give you a very solid understanding of the philosophy, thought process, development details, and methodologies involved in building well-designed, robust Android Wear applications. We cover the advantages and disadvantages of the wearable computing paradigm and provide a good foundational knowledge for you to build practical, real-world wearable apps. You will learn about the various tools, platforms, libraries, SDKs, and technology needed to build Android Wear apps. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in building Android wearable apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Android Wear Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

What is a companion app anyway?


Wearable apps run directly on the wearable device and in this way let you access the device's hardware, activities, and services all on the device itself. The breadth of operations that may be performed on a wearable device is limited by design, owing to the smaller scale and the need to efficiently manage processing power and memory. In addition to that, wearables don't support the Google Play store. In addition to that, Android Wear 1.x does not allow direct install of apps from the Google Play Store.

A companion handheld app addresses these concerns to let us benefit from a rich user experience on our wearable device. The point to remember is that a wearable app is packaged within a companion handheld app. The companion app is what gets published to the Google Play store, as described in the following figure:

When users download the companion app to a handheld device, the wearable app within it is automatically pushed to all connected wearables, as described...