Make your smartwatch yours with these 5 ways to personalize your smartwatch: watch faces, tiles, complications, apps and more.
Smartwatches are becoming increasingly popular, with many people using them to stay connected, track their health, and control their devices. Watches enable people to get information at a glance and then take action. These quick and frequent interactions can help people get back to being present in their daily lives.
To help with the challenges of designing and building great watch experiences that work for all, we have created a series of videos. These videos cover a variety of topics starting with how to understand what people want from a smartwatch app. We cover how best to design for your target audience, and how to make the most of the watch’s form factor with a series of design principles. Lastly, we give you an introduction on how to approach product inclusion throughout the whole development lifecycle, and how this approach can help make your products better for all. If you’re interested in learning more, be sure to check out the videos below.
If you’re considering building a smartwatch app but don’t know how to begin, this video will help you get started. It shows how to uncover what people want from a smartwatch app, what a great Wear OS experience should look like, and how to ensure it addresses real needs of the people you are building for. Lastly, you’ll find out how to take an equity-focused approach when developing products, apps, and experiences.
Did you know that the average smartwatch interaction is approximately 5 seconds long? In this video you will learn how to design effective and engaging experiences for Wear OS. We’ll guide you on how to make the most out of these short watch interactions by covering key differences between mobile and smartwatch design, the importance of a glanceable user experience, and practical tips for designing for different Wear OS surfaces.
We will introduce you to Product Inclusion and Equity, and how to approach it when designing for Wear OS. You will learn how to build for belonging and make products more accessible and usable by all.
Here you will see a series of case studies showing how product and design choices can be impactful on a personal, community, and systemic level. Designs can both be affirming and inclusive, or harmful and exclusionary to various people and communities. We’ll use some examples to highlight how important inclusion and equity considerations are when making product decisions.
The last video in this series will give you an introduction into community co-design, a powerful approach that focuses on building solutions with, not for, historically marginalized communities. In community co-design, we engage with people based on identity, culture, community, and context. You’ll find out how to engage people and communities in a safe, respectful, and equity-centered way in product development.
Keep your eyes peeled for more updates from us as we continue to share and evolve our latest design thinking and practices, principles, and guidelines.
We also have many more resources to help get you started designing for Wear OS:
- Find inspiring designs for different types of apps in our gallery
- Interested in designing for multiple devices from TV’s to mobiles to tablets, check out our design hub
- Access developer documentation for Wear OS
Look out for new features and apps — like Gmail, Calendar and WhatsApp — plus a new OS update coming to your smartwatch this year.
We are excited to announce the launch of the Watch Face Format! We worked in partnership with Samsung to introduce a new way for you to build watch faces for Wear OS smartwatches.
The Watch Face Format is a declarative XML format to design the appearance and behavior of watch faces. This means that there is no executable code involved in creating a watch face, and there will be no code embedded in your watch face APK.
The Wear OS platform takes care of the logic needed to render the watch face so you no longer have to worry about code optimizations or battery performance.
Watch faces that are built with this new format require less maintenance and fewer updates than the ones built using the Jetpack Watch Face library. For example, you no longer need to update your watch face to benefit from improvements in performance or battery consumption, or to get the latest bug fixes.
Starting today, you can build watch faces in this new format and publish them on Google Play, ready for when the first Wear OS 4 watches are available.
The Watch Face Format lets you create…
Analog and digital watch faces:
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Watch faces with complications:
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Customizable watch faces:
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And more...
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With the Watch Face Format, we have included the watch face editor as part of Wear OS itself, so users can customize every watch face using the same editor UI. You no longer need to build your own watch face editor for users to customize their watch face.
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| Wear OS 4’s editor for watch faces made using the Watch Face Format |
The new Watch Face Format can be used to build watch faces directly, or it can be integrated into creation tools, allowing designers to create watch faces without having to write any executable code.
Today, Samsung has released the latest version of Watch Face Studio, ready for you to try now. As an alternative to directly writing XML using the Watch Face Format, Watch Face Studio makes it easy for designers to create watch faces without any coding experience.
Watch faces made in the latest version of Watch Face Studio use the Watch Face Format by default when they are run on a Wear OS 4 watch, or they run as traditional watch faces when the watch face runs on a Wear OS 3 watch.
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| Using Watch Face Studio to create a watch face |
Build watch faces using the Watch Face Format today:
- Get started with watch faces, or create watch face tools, using our documentation.
- Create watch faces with Samsung’s Watch Face Studio design tool.
- Publish your watch faces on Google Play today, following this guidance.
- Check out design guidelines for Wear OS watch faces.
- Hear more about the Watch Face Format in our I/O technical session.
As we continue to evolve the Wear OS platform, we're excited to share with you some of the newest features and improvements that have been added to help you create innovative and engaging experiences for your users.
Partners like Peloton and Todoist have been building exceptional experiences for Wear OS - and seeing the impact on their feature-adoption and engagement. Hear directly from Peloton engineers about how they built a differentiated experience for the watch with Compose for Wear OS.
In this blog post, we’ll be highlighting some of the key updates we announced at Google I/O this year, so let’s dive in and explore the latest advancements in Wear OS!
Today we’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Wear OS 4, the next version of Google’s smartwatch platform arriving later this year. It has enhancements to security, user customization, and power optimizations.
This preview introduces several new tools to help enhance your Wear OS app experience:
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| Watch faces created using the new Format |
Wear OS tiles give users fast, predictable access to the information and actions they rely on most. Version 1.2 of the Jetpack Tiles library introduces support for platform data bindings, so if your tile uses platform data sources such as heart rate, step count, or time, your tile is updated once per second.
The new version of tiles also adds support for animations. You can use tween animations to create smooth transitions on changes to part of your layout, and transition animations can animate new or disappearing elements from the tile.
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| Examples of animated Tiles |
Wear OS 4 is based on Android 13, which is several versions newer than the current Wear OS version, so your app will need to handle the system behavior changes that took effect in Android 12 and Android 13. We recommend you start by testing your app and releasing a compatible update first – as devices get upgraded to Wear OS 4, it’s a basic but a critical level of quality that provides a good app experience for users.
Download the Wear OS 4 emulator in Android Studio Hedgehog to explore new features and test your app on Wear OS 4 Developer Preview.
Firebase Test Lab will support running tests for your standalone app on physical Google Pixel Watches in the next few weeks. You can run your automated tests on the Google Pixel Watch via Gradle Managed Devices, or use the Firebase Console to also run Robo tests. To learn more, check out available devices.
Today we are also excited to announce Wear OS support in Google Play Pre-launch reports for standalone apps. The Pre-launch report helps to identify issues proactively before your app reaches users, so it’s an important tool to help you launch a high-quality app. You can test for stability, accessibility, security and trust, and screenshot previews! At the moment the analysis runs on Wear emulators and it is soon launching on Google Pixel Watches.
The Wear OS 4 emulator brings support for emulated Bluetooth, which lets you test more use cases, for example Bluetooth audio.
The new Wear OS 4 emulator doesn’t support unmanaged 32-bit code, so if your app uses native code, make sure that it includes both 32-bit and 64-bit native libraries. This will also prepare your app for upcoming 64-bit only hardware.
In Android Studio Hedgehog we also added capabilities for capturing screenshots and Logcat snapshots in the Wear OS emulator, so it is now much easier to generate screenshots for your app’s store listing.
Since the latest stable Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release, we continue to bring new features and improvements to the toolkit. Version 1.2 already has a number of alpha releases – check out release notes to find out more.
Health Services version 1.0 has introduced a few new features in latest beta releases. Most notably, it includes BatchingMode to deliver batched exercise data at a configured interval instead of the default interval, as well as an ExerciseTypeConfig API which enables updates during ongoing exercises, such as golfing. If you are interested to learn what's new in Android Health, check out this blog.
Wear OS active devices have grown 5x since launching Wear OS 3, and it's the fastest growing smartwatch platform.
We’re excited to share our brand new Wear OS Gallery, where you can find even more guidance with proven design and development patterns for messaging, media, and health & fitness apps!
With the latest updates, you'll have even more tools at your disposal to create beautiful, high-quality wearable experiences.
Get started building for Wear OS with hands-on experience! Try our Compose for Wear OS codelab, and check out the documentation and samples.
The new Wear OS quality requirements will come into effect on August 31, 2023, so consider them early when designing and developing your app.
We’re looking forward to seeing the experiences that you build!
Posted by Ishaan Aggarwal, Product Manager
Today we are announcing upcoming policy changes intended to improve the quality of apps for Wear OS and their presentation in the Google Play Store. We are introducing these changes to ensure app users get a basic consistent experience across all apps in accordance with our latest Wear OS design and development principles. In addition, updates to the publishing requirements will improve the discovery and presentation of your Wear OS apps in the Google Play Store.
The new requirements will come into effect from August 31, 2023. Until then, we will continue to use the existing policies to review and maintain the quality of Wear OS apps. The overall Wear OS app review process will continue to be mandatory and remains unchanged.
Alongside the above policy changes, all Wear OS apps must target Android 11 (API level 30). Apps that target lower levels will stop being discoverable to all Google Play users whose devices run Android OS versions newer than the app’s target API level from August 31, 2023. This is to ensure that the app is built to meet the safety and quality standard that users expect from newer Wear OS versions.
The following list highlights examples of upcoming quality changes. See a comprehensive list of review criteria here:
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Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
This past year was a special one for the Android community, from the release of Android 13, a big investment in tablets and large screens, the latest in wearable technology to all of the investments in Modern Android Development! It was terrific to see many of you for the first time again in-person at Android Dev Summit and other events around the world.From the experiences you build for users to feedback you provide us to make your tools better, we wanted to say a very special holiday thank you!
We put together a highlights recap, and a commemorative poster celebrating 2022 - download it to bring some holiday cheer to your workspace, wherever you may be this season.
Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Android Developer Relations Engineer
Today we’re releasing version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit to help developers build beautiful, responsive apps for Wear OS.
Since the first stable release earlier this year, we have seen many developers taking advantage of the powerful tools and intuitive APIs to make building their app simpler and more efficient. Todoist and Outdooractive are some of the developers that rebuilt their Wear apps with Compose and accelerated the delivery of a new, functional user experience.
Todoist increased its growth rate by 50% since rebuilding their app for Wear 3 and Outdooractive reduced development time by 30% and saw a significant boost in developer productivity and better design/developer collaboration:
“Compose makes the UI code more intuitive to write and read, allowing us to prototype faster in the design phase and also collaborate better on the code. What would have taken us days now takes us hours.”
The Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release contains new features and brings improvements to existing components, focusing on UX and accessibility. We’ve already updated our samples, codelab, and Horologist libraries to work with Compose for Wear OS 1.1.
The Compose for Wear OS 1.1 release includes the following new functionality (baseline profiles already added for new components):
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| OutlinedChip and OutlinedButton composables |
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| Different Chip and Button shapes |
A new experimental API has been added to implement placeholder support. This can be used to achieve three distinct visual effects separately or all together:
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| Placeholder API usage examples |
Check out the reference docs and sample in Horologist to see how to apply the placeholder to common use cases, such as a Chip with icon and a label that puts placeholder over individual content slots and draws a placeholder shimmer on top while waiting for data to load.
Horologist’s fadeAway modifier has been graduated to scrollAway modifier in version 1.1. Modifier.scrollAway scrolls an item vertically in and out of view, based on the scroll state, and already has overloads to work with Column, LazyColumn and ScalingLazyColumn.
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| ScrollAway modifier usage with TimeText |
CurvedTextStyle now supports additional parameters (fontFamily, fontWeight, fontStyle, fontSynthesis) to specify font details when creating a curved text style. Extended curved text style can be used on both curvedText and basicCurvedText.
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| Applying different font to curved text |
The 1.1 release also focuses on bringing a refined user experience, improvements for TalkBack support and overall better accessibility:
To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started with hands-on experience trying our codelab, and make sure to check out the documentation and samples. Visit Compose for Wear OS release notes for full list of changes available in version 1.1.
Note that using version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.3 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.10. Check out the Compose to Kotlin Compatibility Map for more information.
Compose for Wear OS continues to evolve with the features you’ve been asking for. Please do continue providing us feedback on the issue tracker and join Kotlin Slack #compose-wear channel to connect with the Google team and dev community.
We’re excited to see a growing number of apps using Compose for Wear OS in production, and we’re grateful for all issues and requests that help us to make the toolkit better!
Discover even more with technical sessions from the Android Dev Summit providing guidance on app architecture, testing, handling rotary input, and verticalized sessions for media and fitness.
The World Cup kick-off countdown is on! To make sure you don’t miss any major moments, here are new features that will help you stay up to date as 32 nations compete to win it all.
Whether you are a casual fan, soccer aficionado or hopping on the bandwagon, we’ve got you covered! To prepare for the tournament, search “World Cup” and follow your favorite teams. Simply click on the bell in the top-right-hand corner to opt-in to receive notifications about your squad. We know the best fans care deeply about the details like who is dominating the passing game. Now, when you look up a match you will be able to view in-depth stats, win probabilities and key events timelines.
You can also catch all the “ooh”, “ahh'' and “GOOAAAL” moments you might have missed with daily recap videos directly on Search from FIFA+ and official broadcasters including beIN SPORTS, BBC, ZDF and more. Dive even deeper and look up your favorite athletes to learn more about their stories and accomplishments.
No matter which player or team you are rooting for, soccer is all about community and a little friendly competition. On Search when you look up players, you’ll be able to rate players based on how you think they’ll perform and see how that rating stands up against the others. Soon you can also compete with fans in our multiplayer online game. People from around the world will work together to help their team score the most amount of goals to win. Once a real-life match is set, pick your team and work with other fans to score the most virtual goals before the match ends.
There are even more ways to watch the biggest moments throughout the tournament on YouTube. World Cup fans can catch up on and rewatch the most exciting moments of every game on YouTube via FIFA and official broadcast channels. Starting November 20, YouTube TV subscribers can watch live the FIFA World Cup 2022™ on FOX and FS1, and make the most of their viewing experience with gameday features such as key plays to catch up on real-time highlights, stats, scores and standings. Members subscribed to the 4K Plus add-on can enjoy all 64 matches in ultra-high-definition. For those looking to tune in to the Spanish broadcast, Telemundo is included as part of the YouTube TV Base Plan. You can also find exclusive Shorts and long-form content for this year’s World Cup from creators like Deestroying, Rima, Cheeky Boyos, Jesser, Abo Flah and more. Relive and react to your favorite World Cup moments using the Remix feature in Shorts. Be sure to follow along using #ShortsFIFAWorldCup and join in the fun by using this hashtag when you upload your own content.
With your Google TV device, you'll be able to tune in to everything from the group stage to the finale. Jump straight into live matches featured in your For you tab. A new row lets you explore World Cup content like live games, highlights, recaps and more from FIFA+, ITV, Peacock, Telemundo, ViX and other broadcasters. These updates on Google TV are available on the new Chromecast with Google TV and other Google TV devices including Hisense, Philips, Sony and TCL.
Want to watch the game with other fans? A new label for businesses on Search will launch ahead of the games and help you do just that. Soon you can simply search for “Where to watch the world cup near me” within Search to find a nearby venue of your choice. Business owners should review their local rules about showing sporting events to the public before applying the new label.
Google Assistant is helping long-time soccer fans and those new to the World Cup with an expanded collection of facts. Say "Give me a soccer fun fact" to learn about the first females to referee the tournament, the number of stadiums lined up to host the event and more. To chat about the game, ask Assistant, "Do you like soccer?" and "Who's your favorite soccer player?", or celebrate together with "It's game time" or "Say goal!"
The World Cup kick-off countdown is on! To make sure you don’t miss any major moments, here are new features that will help you stay up to date as 32 nations compete to win it all.
Whether you are a casual fan, soccer aficionado or hopping on the bandwagon, we’ve got you covered! To prepare for the tournament, search “World Cup” and follow your favorite teams. Simply click on the bell in the top-right-hand corner to opt-in to receive notifications about your squad. We know the best fans care deeply about the details like who is dominating the passing game. Now, when you look up a match you will be able to view in-depth stats, win probabilities and key events timelines.
You can also catch all the “ooh”, “ahh'' and “GOOAAAL” moments you might have missed with daily recap videos directly on Search from FIFA+ and official broadcasters including beIN SPORTS, BBC, ZDF and more. Dive even deeper and look up your favorite athletes to learn more about their stories and accomplishments.
No matter which player or team you are rooting for, soccer is all about community and a little friendly competition. On Search when you look up players, you’ll be able to rate players based on how you think they’ll perform and see how that rating stands up against the others. Soon you can also compete with fans in our multiplayer online game. People from around the world will work together to help their team score the most amount of goals to win. Once a real-life match is set, pick your team and work with other fans to score the most virtual goals before the match ends.
There are even more ways to watch the biggest moments throughout the tournament on YouTube. World Cup fans can catch up on and rewatch the most exciting moments of every game on YouTube via FIFA and official broadcast channels. Starting November 20, YouTube TV subscribers can watch live the FIFA World Cup 2022™ on FOX and FS1, and make the most of their viewing experience with gameday features such as key plays to catch up on real-time highlights, stats, scores and standings. Members subscribed to the 4K Plus add-on can enjoy all 64 matches in ultra-high-definition. For those looking to tune in to the Spanish broadcast, Telemundo is included as part of the YouTube TV Base Plan. You can also find exclusive Shorts and long-form content for this year’s World Cup from creators like Deestroying, Rima, Cheeky Boyos, Jesser, Abo Flah and more. Relive and react to your favorite World Cup moments using the Remix feature in Shorts. Be sure to follow along using #ShortsFIFAWorldCup and join in the fun by using this hashtag when you upload your own content.
With your Google TV device, you'll be able to tune in to everything from the group stage to the finale. Jump straight into live matches featured in your For you tab. A new row lets you explore World Cup content like live games, highlights, recaps and more from FIFA+, ITV, Peacock, Telemundo, ViX and other broadcasters. These updates on Google TV are available on the new Chromecast with Google TV and other Google TV devices including Hisense, Philips, Sony and TCL.
Want to watch the game with other fans? A new label for businesses on Search will launch ahead of the games and help you do just that. Soon you can simply search for “Where to watch the world cup near me” within Search to find a nearby venue of your choice. Business owners should review their local rules about showing sporting events to the public before applying the new label.
Google Assistant is helping long-time soccer fans and those new to the World Cup with an expanded collection of facts. Say "Give me a soccer fun fact" to learn about the first females to referee the tournament, the number of stadiums lined up to host the event and more. To chat about the game, ask Assistant, "Do you like soccer?" and "Who's your favorite soccer player?", or celebrate together with "It's game time" or "Say goal!"
Posted by Matthew Pateman & Mallory Carroll (UX Research), and Josef Burnham (UX Design)
Posted by Anna Bernbaum, Product Manager
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