Tag Archives: OnePlus

Android Device Streaming: Announcing Early Access to Samsung, Xiaomi, and Oppo Device Labs

Posted by Grant Yang (Product Manager for OmniLab) & Adarsh Fernando (Product Manager for Android Studio)

At Google I/O 2024, we announced Android Device Streaming in open beta, which allows you as a developer to more easily access and interactively test your app on real physical devices located in Google data centers and streamed directly to Android Studio. This enables teams in any location to access a variety of devices across top Android device manufacturers, including the latest family of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy series devices.

We’re significantly expanding on the diversity of devices available in this service by working closely with Android device manufacturers (also known as original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs)—such as Samsung, Xiaomi, and Oppo—to connect their device labs to Android Device Streaming, so you can access even more physical devices directly in your workflow in Android Studio. This integration is offered with the same performance, stability, and security benefits you get with devices provided by Google. Keep reading for more details below, as well as how you can sign up for the early access and take advantage of these new devices.

screen grab of Device Streaming in Android Studio
Access devices hosted by Google and other OEMs, such as Samsung, with Android Device Streaming, powered by Firebase

Signup for Early Access to OEM Lab Devices

If you haven’t already done so, follow the steps to get up and running with the beta release of Android Device Streaming, which will give you access to all the Google-hosted devices to test with directly from Android Studio. Later this year, we will start an Early Access Program that allows participants to use Android Device Streaming to connect to devices hosted by our OEM partners. This expands the catalog of test devices available to you with Android Device Streaming.

To kick off this program, we’re first partnering with Samsung, Xiaomi, and Oppo. These labs will be situated in various locations around the world, and you will be able to use the Firebase project you’re already using with Android Device Streaming in Android Studio to access them. Your Firebase project’s administrator will have control to enable or disable individual OEM labs.

If you’d like to participate in the EAP for accessing OEM device labs, fill out this form, and we will let you know if you and your team have been accepted. During the EAP, OEM-provided devices will not be billed or counted against your promotional monthly quota.

We look forward to sharing more details during Google’s I/O Connect Beijing in early August 2024.

In the meantime, we encourage you to try out the devices currently available in Android Device Streaming. Currently, the Android Device Streaming program is in a promotional period, with a higher amount of monthly minutes offered at no cost, which will last until approximately February 2025.

OEM Labs powered by OmniLab

Omnilab Logo

Some of you may wonder how these devices are being connected through to Android Studio. Under the hood, Android Device Streaming is built on top of the device platform for Google, OmniLab. OmniLab, the same device platform that powers all internal device labs, is also powering the OEM labs. Omnilab did this by open sourcing their Android Test Station (ATS) framework available to its open source.

OmniLab provides a framework to ensure that your Android Device Streaming session is secure and performant. You’re able to deploy, debug, and interact with your app on these remote devices through a direct ADB over SSL connection, all without having to leave the IDE. And when the session ends, the device data is fully wiped and factory reset before it’s made available to another developer.


In summary, if you’d like to participate in the EAP for accessing OEM device labs, fill out this form, and we will let you know if you and your team have been accepted. During the EAP, OEM-provided devices will not be billed or counted against your promotional monthly quota.

Be part of our vibrant community on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X and share your experiences on using Android Device streaming in Android Studio.

Wear OS hybrid interface: Boosting power and performance

Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Android Developer Relations Engineer

In collaboration with our hardware partners, we’ve continued to prioritize the Wear OS by Google user experience. As such, we’ve made fundamental design changes to the platform and substantially expanded the capabilities of the Wear OS hybrid interface that improve two key areas: power and performance.

With OnePlus Watch 2, powered with the latest version of Wear OS (Wear OS 4), the dual-chipset architecture works with our hybrid interface to get both chips to work better in tandem. This enables even more use cases to benefit from dramatically extended battery life of up to 100 hours of regular use with all functionalities accessible in Smart Mode.

Together, we’ve created a premium smartwatch experience that doesn’t compromise the advanced feature set or battery life. In this post, we’ll share how you can benefit from these changes when building experiences for Wear OS.

On the edge of innovation: redesigned smartwatch architecture

Wear OS smartwatches have a dual-chipset architecture inclusive of a powerful application processor (AP) and ultra low-power co-processor microcontroller unit (MCU). The architecture has a powerful AP capable of handling complex operations en-masse, and is seamlessly coupled with a low power MCU.

The Wear OS hybrid interface enables intelligent switching between the MCU or the AP, allowing the AP to be suspended when not needed to preserve battery life. It helps, for instance, achieve more power-efficient experiences, like sensor data processing on the MCU while the AP is asleep. At the same time, the hybrid interface provides a seamless transition between these states, keeping a rich and premium user experience without jarring transitions between power modes.

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Connectivity and notification experience

To enhance connectivity-reliant interactions like notifications and phone calls, OnePlus utilized platform capabilities with the notification API in the hybrid interface, enabling the MCU to process regular notification experiences and reduce the need to activate the AP.

For example, bridged notifications will be delivered to the watch without waking up the high-performance AP. Users can read and dismiss these notifications while the watch is still powered by the MCU. The MCU can also handle wearable-specific actions in notifications, such as quick replies or remote actions.

What this means for development

You can leverage existing Wear OS APIs to get these optimizations without any added effort – no code changes required!

Notifications

The notification hybrid interface enables seamless transitions between power modes to work with the Wear OS notification stack. You get the best notification performance by using the Notification API.

Health & Fitness experiences

The Wear OS hybrid interface also elevates the fitness experience with more precise workout tracking, automatic sports recognition and smarter health data monitoring. All of these can be offered to users without compromising battery life.

Starting with Wear OS 3, developers use Health Services on Wear OS to gain access to sensor data. The health hybrid interface works under the hood to enable power optimizations by batching sensor data on the MCU and periodically updating developer apps through the Health Services API on the AP.

Watch Faces

With Wear OS 4, we launched the Watch Face Format, a declarative XML format to create customizable and power-efficient watch faces.

The platform has created capabilities to implement Watch Face Format rendering on the MCU, so using the new format helps future-proof certain watch faces to take advantage of emerging optimizations in future devices for better battery usage.

Check out the watch face format documentation and design guidelines for Wear OS watch faces.

Expand your reach with Wear OS

With the additions to the Wear OS smartwatch ecosystem and expanded device capabilities, it's an ideal time to build experiences for smartwatches that can reach more users and benefit your business.

To begin developing apps for Wear OS, try our Compose for Wear OS codelab, and check out the documentation and samples.

Read more about developer updates in Wear OS 4, and how you can get your apps ready for the latest Wear OS watches.

We can’t wait to see what experiences you’ll build!