Tag Archives: Wear OS

The new Google Pixel Watch is here – start building for Wear OS!

Posted by the Android Developers Team

If you caught yesterday's Made by Google event, then you saw the latest devices in the Pixel portfolio. Besides the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones, we wanted to showcase two of the latest form factors: the Google Pixel Tablet1 (Google's brand new tablet, coming in 2023), and the latest device powered with Wear OS by Google: the Google Pixel Watch! As consumers begin to preorder the watch, it's an especially great time to prepare your app so it looks great on all of the new watches that consumers will get their hands on over the holidays. Discover the latest updates to Wear OS, how apps like yours are upgrading their experiences, and how you can get started building a beautiful, efficient Wear OS app.

Here’s What’s New in Wear OS

The Google Pixel Watch is built on Wear OS and includes the latest updates to the platform, Wear OS 3.5. This version of Wear OS is also available on some of your other favorite Wear OS devices! The new Wear OS experience is designed to feel fluid and easy to navigate, bringing users the information they need with a tap, swipe, or voice command. With a refreshed UI and rich notifications, your users can see even more at a glance.

To take advantage of building on top of all of these new features, earlier this year we released Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help you get your app running with fewer development hours - and fewer lines of code. It's built from the bottom up with Kotlin, and it moved to 1.0 earlier this year, meaning the API is stable and ready for you to get building. Here's what's in the 1.0 release:

  • Material: The Compose Material catalog for Wear OS already offers more components than are available with View-based layouts. The components follow material styling and also implement material theming, which allows you to customize the design for your brand.
  • Declarative: Compose for Wear OS leverages Modern Android Development and works seamlessly with other Jetpack libraries. Compose-based UIs in most cases result in less code and accelerate the development process as a whole, read more.
  • Interoperable: If you have an existing Wear OS app with a large View-based codebase, it's possible to gradually adopt Compose for Wear OS by using the Compose Interoperability APIs rather than having to rewrite the whole codebase.
  • Handles different watch shapes: Compose for Wear OS extends the foundation of Compose, adding a DSL for all curved elements to make it easy to develop for all Wear OS device shapes: round, square, or rectangular with minimal code.
  • Performance: Each Compose for Wear OS library ships with its own baseline profiles that are automatically merged and distributed with your app’s APK and are compiled ahead of time on device. In most cases, this achieves app performance for production builds that is on-par with View-based apps. However, it’s important to know how to configure, develop, and test your app’s performance for the best results. Learn more.

Another exciting update for Wear OS is the launch of the Tiles Material library to help you build tiles more quickly. The Tiles Material Library includes pre-built Material components and layouts that embrace the latest Material Design for Wear OS. This easy to use library includes components for buttons, progress arcs and more - saving you the time of building them from scratch. Plus, with the pre-built layouts, you can kickstart your tiles development knowing your layout follows Material design guidelines on how your tiles should be formatted.

Finally, in the recently released Android Studio Dolphin, we added a range of Wear OS features to help get your apps, tiles, and watch faces ready for all of the Wear OS 3 devices. With an updated Wear OS Emulator Toolbar, an intuitive Pairing Assistant, and the new Direct Surface Launch feature to quickly test watch faces, tiles, and complication, it's now simpler and more efficient than ever to make great apps for WearOS.

Get Inspired with New App Experiences

Apps like yours are already providing fantastic experiences for Wear OS, from Google apps to others like Spotify, Strava, Bitmoji, adidas Running, MyFitnessPal, and Calm. This year, Todoist, PeriodTracker, and Outdooractive all rebuilt their app with Compose - taking advantage of the tools and APIs that make building their app simpler and more efficient; in fact, Outdooractive found that using Compose for Wear OS cut development time by 30% for their team.

With the launch of the Google Pixel Watch, we are seeing fantastic new experiences from Google apps - using the new hardware features as another way to provide an exceptional user experience. Google Photos now allows you to set your favorite picture as your watch face on the Google Pixel Watch, which has 19 customizable watch faces, each with many personalization options. With Google Assistant built in, Google Pixel Watch users can interact with their favorite apps by using the Wear OS app or leveraging the built-in integration with Google Assistant. For example, Google Home’s latest updates users can easily control their smart home devices through the Wear OS app or by saying “Hey Google” to their watch to do everything from adjusting the thermostat to getting notifications from their Nest doorbell when a person or package at the door2.

Health and fitness apps have a lot of opportunity with the latest Wear OS platform and hardware updates. Google Pixel Watch includes Fitbit’s amazing health and fitness features, including accurate heart rate tracking with on-device machine learning and deep optimization down to the processor level. Users can get insights into key metrics like breathing rate, heart rate variability, sleep quality and more right on their Google Pixel Watch. With this improved data, there are more opportunities for health and fitness apps to provide meaningful insights and experiences for their users.

The updates and improvements from Wear OS and the Google Pixel Watch make building differentiated app experiences more tangible. Apps are using those capabilities to excite and delight users and so can you.

Get started

The Google Pixel Watch is the latest addition to an already incredible Wear OS device ecosystem. From improved APIs and tools to exciting new hardware, there is no time like the present to get started on your Wear OS app. To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started on our curated learning pathway for a step-by-step learning journey. Then, check out the documentation including a quick start guide and get hands on experience with the Compose for Wear OS codelab!

Discover even more with the Wear OS session from Google I/O and hear the absolute latest and greatest from Wear OS by tuning into the keynote and technical sessions at the upcoming Android Developer Summit!

Want to learn more about all the MBG announcements? Check out the official blog here. Plus, get started with another exciting form factor coming to the Pixel ecosystem, the Google Pixel Tablet, by optimizing your app for tablets!

Disclaimers:

1. The Google Pixel Tablet has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission or other regulators. This device may not be sold or otherwise distributed until required legal authorizations have been obtained. 
2. Requires compatible smart home devices (sold separately).

Todoist adopted Compose for Wear OS and increased its growth rate by 50%

Posted by Posted by The Android Developers Team

Todoist is the world’s top task and time management app, empowering over 30 million people to organize, plan, and collaborate on projects big and small. As a company, Todoist is committed to creating more fulfilling ways for its users to work and live—which includes access to its app across all devices.

That’s why Todoist developers adopted Compose for Wear OS to completely rebuild its app for wearables. This new UI toolkit gives developers the same easy-to-use suite that Android has made available for other devices, allowing for efficient, manageable app development.

A familiar toolkit optimized for Wear OS

Developers at Todoist already had experience with Jetpack Compose for Android mobile, which allowed them to quickly familiarize themselves with Compose for Wear OS. “When the new Wear design language and Compose for Wear OS were announced, we were thrilled,” said Rastislav Vaško, head of Android for Todoist. “It gave us new motivation and an opportunity to invest in the future of the platform.”

As with Jetpack Compose for mobile, developers can integrate customizable components directly from the Compose for Wear OS toolkit, allowing them to write code and implement design requirements much faster than with the View-based layouts they used previously. With the available documentation and hands-on guidance from the Compose for Wear OS codelab, they were able to translate their prior toolkit knowledge to the wearable platform.

“Compose for Wear OS had almost everything we needed to create our layouts,” said Rastislav. “Swipe-dismiss, TimeText, and ScalingLazyList were all components that worked very well out of the box for us, while still allowing us to make a recognizable and distinct app.” For features that were not yet available in the toolkit, the Todoist team used Google’s Horologist—a group of open-source libraries which provide Wear OS developers with features that are commonly required by developers but not yet available. From there, they used the Compose Layout Library to incorporate the fade away modifier that matched the native design guidelines.

Compose for Wear OS shifts development into overdrive

Compose for Wear OS simplifies UI development for Wear OS, letting engineers create complex screens that are both readable and maintainable because of its rich Kotlin syntax and modern declarative approach. This was a significant benefit for the production of the new Todoist application, enabling developers to achieve more in less time.

The central focus of the overhaul was to redesign all screens and interactions to conform with the latest Material Design for Wear OS. Using Compose for Wear OS, Todoist developers shifted away from WearableDrawerLayout in favor of a flatter app structure. This switch followed Material Design for Wear OS guidance and modernized the application’s layout.

Todoist developers designed each screen specifically for Wear OS devices, removing unnecessary elements that complicated the user experience.

“For wearables, we’re always thinking about what we can leave out, to keep only streamlined, focused, and quick interactions,” Rastislav said. Compose for Wear OS helped the Todoist team tremendously with both development and design, allowing them to introduce maintainable implementation while providing a consistent user experience.

"Since we rebuilt our app with Compose for Wear OS, Todoist’s growth rate of installations on Google Play increased by 50%." 

An elevated user and developer experience

The developers at Todoist rapidly and efficiently created a refreshed application for Wear OS using Jetpack Compose. The modern tooling; intuitive APIs; and host of resources, documentation, and samples made for a smooth design and development process that required less code and accelerated the delivery of a new, functional user experience.

Since the app was revamped, the growth rate for Todoist installs on Google Play has increased 50%, and the team has received positive feedback from internal teams and on social media.

The team at Todoist is looking forward to discovering what else Compose for Wear OS can do for its application. They saw the refresh as an investment in the future of wearables and are excited for the additional opportunities and feature offerings provided by devices running Wear OS 3.

Transform your app with Compose for Wear OS

Todoist completely rebuilt and redesigned its Wear OS application with Compose for Wear OS, improving both the user and developer experience.

Learn more about Jetpack Compose for Wear OS:

Outdooractive boosts user experience on wearable devices with 30% less development time using Compose for Wear OS

Posted by The Android Developers Team

Outdooractive, Europe’s largest outdoor platform, provides trail maps and information to a global community of more than 12 million nature enthusiasts. As a platform focused on helping users plan and navigate their outdoor adventures, Outdooractive has long viewed wearable devices like smart watches as essential to the growth of their app. Users value wearables as navigation tools and activity trackers, so when Google reached out with Android’s new UI toolkit, Compose for Wear OS, Outdooractive’s developers jumped on the opportunity to improve their app for this growing market.

The application overhaul quickly showed the benefits of Compose for Wear OS. It cut development time by an estimated 30% for Outdooractive’s developers, accelerating their ability to create streamlined user interfaces. “What would have taken us days now takes us hours,” said Liam Hargreaves, the Senior Project Manager of Outdooractive.

Having a modern code base and increasing the development speed helped make the UI code more intuitive for the developers to read and write, allowing for faster prototyping in the design phase and more fluid collaboration. This helped the developers create a more convenient experience for users.

Using new tools to create an improved user experience

Outdooractive’s app strives to deliver accurate information in real time to the users’ wearable devices, including turn-by-turn navigation, trail conditions, and weather updates.

“Our app has a relatively complex set of interactions,” said Liam. “Each of these needs to be kept simple, quick, easy to access, and clearly presented — all whilst our customer could be standing on a hillside or in a storm or wearing winter hiking gear and gloves!”

New features in Compose for Wear OS helped the Outdooractive developers create a higher quality app experience for users on the go. The Chip component significantly improved the process for creating lists and allowed developers to use pre-built design elements, saving the team days of work. ScalingLazyColumn also optimized the creation of scrolling screens without the need for RecyclerView or ScrollView.

The developers were also excited by how easy it was to use the AnimatedVisibility component because it allowed them to animate functions that they previously didn’t have time for. The team especially appreciated how Compose for Wear OS made it much easier to present different UI states to the user by communicating “loading” or “error” conditions more clearly.

"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." 


Experimentation without the overhead

Since implementing Compose for Wear OS, Outdooractive’s users have spent more time on wearable devices doing things they normally would have done on their phones, such as navigating hiking routes — a key UI goal that Compose for Wear OS helped the developers to achieve.

“We see wearables as a critical part of our product and market strategy — and the reaction from our users is extremely positive,” Liam said.

Outdooractive’s developers used another Android Wear OS capability called Health Services to implement fitness tracking features such as heart rate monitoring into the app by leveraging on-device sensors to offer an experience unique to wearable devices. Health Services on Wear OS automizes the configuration of all health- and fitness-related sensors; collects their data; and calculates metrics such as heart rate, distance traveled, and pace, making it easy for developers to implement sophisticated app features while also maximizing battery life. With Health Services and Compose for Wear OS, Outdooractive’s developers plan to further expand the app’s offerings that are made possible by body sensors.

Outdooractive’s streamlined process shows just how easy Compose for Wear OS makes application development because it gives developers the flexibility to experiment with different layouts without increasing development overhead.

Liam had clear advice for other developers considering using Compose for Wear OS: “Fully embrace it.”

Boost your wearable app’s capabilities

Jetpack Compose for Wear OS helps build more engaging user experiences for wearable devices.

To get a first look, watch the Wear OS talk from Google I/O or try the Compose for Wear OS codelab to start learning now.

Wear OS Tiles Material Library: Build Tiles, Fast.

Posted by Anna Bernbaum, Product Manager, Ataul Munim, Developer Relations Engineer

We are excited to announce the launch of the Tiles Material library! Now, instead of building buttons, progress arcs and more from scratch, you can use our pre-built Material components and layouts to create tiles that embrace the latest Material design for Wear OS. You can use these together with the Tiles Design Kit to easily follow the Tiles Design Guidelines.

Tiles provide Wear OS users glanceable access to the information and actions they need in order to get things done quickly. They also are one of the most used surfaces on Wear OS. Just one swipe away from the watch face, users can quickly access the most important information or actions from an app, like starting a timer or getting the latest weather forecast.

animation showing the tiles experience on Wear OS. User swipes left from the watch face to see the first tile, and continues swiping to see others, including a fitness tile with buttons to initiate a workout, a music tile with chips to navigate to playlists, an alarm tile showing an upcoming alarm, among others.
Tiles carousel on Wear OS

We have built the following components for elements commonly used in tiles:
common tile components. a round icon with a pencil labelled "button". a full width rectangle with rounded corners and text labelled "chip". similar components, one larger and one smaller, labelled "title chip" and "compact chip" respectively. a circle path filled 75% clockwise labelled "circular progress indicator" and finally text labelled "text with recommended typography pre-set"

These components also make it faster to build tiles. For example, creating a button for your tile takes just a few lines of code:

val clickable: Clickable = generateClickable()

val button: Button = Button.Builder(this, clickable)
    .setIconContent("icon_exercise")

    .setContentDescription("Start workout")

    .build()



We have also created some predefined layouts to kickstart your tiles development. These already follow our design guidelines on how your tile layout should be formatted.
A calendar event tile with vertically stacked text details with an "open" action at the bottom, a weather tile showing a cloud icon, the current temperature and the day's high and low in a single row, a step counter tile with a progress indicator encircling the content and a timer tile with 5 buttons for different durations.

For example, we can build this tile using a predefined layout:
Tile with a PrimaryLayout, showing "Primary label text" at the top and "Action" as the primary chip at the bottom. The content slot is a MultiButtonLayout with 2 round icons , each with the plus sign.

val theme = Colors(

    /*primary=*/ 0xFFD0BCFF.toInt(), /*onPrimary=*/ 0xFF381E72.toInt(),

    /*surface=*/ 0xFF202124.toInt(), /*onSurface=*/ 0xFFFFFFFF.toInt()

)

val buttonColors = ButtonColors.secondaryButtonColors(theme)

val chipColors = ChipColors.primaryChipColors(theme)

val timeline = Timeline.fromLayoutElement(
    PrimaryLayout.Builder(deviceParameters)

        .setPrimaryLabelTextContent(

            Text.Builder(this, "1 run this week")

                .setTypography(Typography.TYPOGRAPHY_CAPTION1)

                .setColor(argb(theme.primary))

                .build()

        )

        .setContent(

            MultiButtonLayout.Builder()

                .addButtonContent(

                    Button.Builder(this, clickable)

                        .setIconContent("icon_run")

                        .setButtonColors(buttonColors)

                        .setContentDescription("Run")

                        .build()

                )

                .addButtonContent(

                    Button.Builder(this, clickable)

                        .setIconContent("icon_yoga")

                        .setButtonColors(buttonColors)

                        .setContentDescription("Yoga")

                        .build()

                )
                .addButtonContent(

                    Button.Builder(this, clickable)

                        .setIconContent("icon_cycle")

                        .setButtonColors(buttonColors)

                        .setContentDescription("Cycle")

                        .build()

                )

                .build()

        )

        .setPrimaryChipContent(

            CompactChip.Builder(this, "More", clickable, deviceParameters)

                .setChipColors(chipColors)

                .build()

        )

        .build()

)


What's in the library

This library contains components and layouts that are in-line with Material guidelines and easy to use. The included components are:
  • Button - clickable, circular-shaped object, with either icon, text or image with three predefined sizes.
  • Chip - clickable, stadium-shaped object that can contain an icon, primary and secondary labels, and has fixed height and customizable width.
  • CompactChip & TitleChip - two variations of the standard Chip that have smaller and larger heights, respectively, and can contain one line of text.
  • CircularProgressIndicator - colored arc around the edge of the screen with the given start and end angles, which can describe a full or partial circle with the full progress arc behind it.
  • Text - styled text which uses the recommended Wear Material typography styles.
All these components have their own colors object that can be built with the main Colors class to easily apply the same theme over all components. In addition to colors, there is a Typography class to easily get FontStyle objects using the typography name.

In addition to components, there are recommended tile layouts:
  • PrimaryLayout - a layout which can be customized by adding primary or secondary labels, content in the middle, and a primary chip at the bottom. The main content within this layout could be added as a MultiSlotLayout or MultiButtonLayout object.
  • EdgeContentLayout - a layout for hosting CircularProgressIndicator around the edge with main content inside and primary or secondary label around it.
  • MultiButtonLayout - a layout that can contain between 1 - 7 buttons, arranged in line with the Material guidelines depending on their number.
  • MultiSlotLayout - a row-like style layout with horizontally aligned and spaced slots (for icons or other small content).
All layouts have recommended padding and styles applied that are within Material guidelines.


Tools for tiles

Android Studio Dolphin includes the Direct Surface Launch feature. This lets developers install and launch a tile directly from Android Studio, instead of having to manually add it from the tile selector on the target device. Get started with Direct Surface Launch by creating a new Run Configuration and selecting Wear OS Tile, then choosing the module and TileService class.

Horologist Tiles is also recommended to save time during tile development. This library gives you the ability to preview a tile UI straight from Android Studio, making the write-test loop a lot shorter. Horologist Tiles also includes Kotlin friendly abstractions, like CoroutinesTileService so you can use what you're already familiar with.


Get started with Tiles Material

For a quick start, take a look at the new Tiles codelab, the code sample and the docs.

Please share your feedback on the issue tracker and let us know what you think of Tiles Material!









Build apps for the new Samsung devices

Posted by Diana Wong (Android Product Manager), Kseniia Shumelchyk (Developer Relations Engineer) and Sara Vickerman (Android Developer Marketing)

This week, Samsung launched the latest devices to come to the Android ecosystem at their Galaxy Unpacked event. If you haven’t already, check out their two new foldables, the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4, and their new lineup of watches running on Wear OS, the Galaxy Watch5 series. You can learn more about their announcements here.

With the excitement around these new devices, there's never been a better time to invest in making sure your app has an amazing experience for users, on large screens or Wear OS! Here’s what you need to know to get started:

Get your apps ready for foldables, like the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4

With their unique foldable experience, the Galaxy Z Flip4 and Z Fold4 are great examples of how Android devices come in all shapes and sizes. The Z Fold4 is the latest in large screen devices, a category that continues to see impressive growth. Active large screen users are approaching 270 million, making it a great time to optimize your apps for tablets, foldables and Chrome OS.

Last year, we launched Android 12L, a feature drop designed to make Android 12 even better on tablets and foldable devices, and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold4 will be the first device to run 12L out of the box! Android 12L includes UI updates tailor-made for large screens, improvements to the multitasking experience, and enhancements to compatibility mode so your app looks better out of the box. Since 12L, we also launched Android 13, which includes all these large screen updates and more.

Get started building for foldables by checking out the documentation. The Z Fold4 and Z Flip4 can be used in multiple different folded states, like Samsung’s “flex mode” where you can go hands-free when doing anything from watching a show to taking a photo. To get your app looking great however it’s folded, you can use the Jetpack WindowManager library to make your app fold aware and test your app on foldables. And finally, the large screen app quality guidelines is a comprehensive set of checklists to help make your app the best it can be across an ever expanding ecosystem of large screen devices.

Developers who put in this work are starting to see results; eBay increased their app rating to 4.7 stars on Google Play after optimizing for large screens. Chrome's multitasking usage increased 18x for large screens with 12L.


Build exceptional Wear OS apps

The Wear OS platform expanded this week with the new and improved Galaxy Watch5 series. This lineup of devices builds on Samsung’s commitment to the wearable platform, which we saw last year when they launched Wear OS Powered by Samsung on the Galaxy Watch4 series.

If you’re looking to get started building for the latest Galaxy Watch 5 series, or any other Wear OS device, now is a great time to check out version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS. This is the first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to make building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive. The toolkit brings the best of Jetpack Compose to Wear OS, accelerating the development process so you can create beautiful apps with fewer lines of code.

The 1.0 release streamlines UI development by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax. It also provides a rich set of UI components optimized for the watch experience and is accompanied by many powerful tools in Android Studio to streamline UI iteration. That’s why Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps.

We’ve built a set of materials to help you get started with Compose for Wear OS! Check out our curated learning pathway for a step-by-step journey, documentation including a quick start guide, the Compose for Wear OS codelab for hands-on experience, and samples available on Github.

Similarly to Compose for Wear OS, we’re building Wear OS Tile Components to make it faster and easier to build tiles. Tiles provide Wear OS users glanceable access to the information and actions they need in order to get things done quickly and they are one of the most used features on Wear OS. This update brings material components and layouts so you can create Tiles that embrace the latest Material design for Wear OS. Right now this is in beta, but keep a lookout for the launch announcement!

Another launch announcement to watch out for is Android Studio Dolphin, the latest release from Android Studio. Check out these features designed to make wearable app development easier:
  • Updated Wear OS emulator toolbar which now includes buttons and gestures available on Wear OS devices, such as palm and tilting and simulating two physical buttons.
  • Emulator pairing assistant to pair multiple Wear OS devices with a single virtual or physical phone. Android Studio remembers pairings after being closed and allows you to see Wear devices in the Device Manager.
  • Direct surface launch that allows you to create run/debug configurations for Wear OS tiles, watch faces, and complications, and launch them directly from Android Studio.
Between Jetpack Compose, Tile Components and Android Studio Dolphin, we are simplifying Wear OS app development. And, with the addition of the Galaxy Watch5 series to the Wear OS ecosystem, there are even more reasons to build an exceptional Wear OS app.


There’s never been a better time to start optimizing!

Form factors are having a major moment this year and Google is committed to helping you optimize and build across form factors with new content and tools, including sessions and workshops from this year’s Google I/O and new Android Studio features. Plus, we have Material Design guidance for large screens and Wear OS to help you in your optimization journey.

From the Watch5 series to the Z Fold4, Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked brought us innovations across screen sizes and types. Prepare your app so it looks great across the entire Android device ecosystem!

Build apps for the new Samsung devices

Posted by Diana Wong (Android Product Manager), Kseniia Shumelchyk (Developer Relations Engineer) and Sara Vickerman (Android Developer Marketing)

This week, Samsung launched the latest devices to come to the Android ecosystem at their Galaxy Unpacked event. If you haven’t already, check out their two new foldables, the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4, and their new lineup of watches running on Wear OS, the Galaxy Watch5 series. You can learn more about their announcements here.

With the excitement around these new devices, there's never been a better time to invest in making sure your app has an amazing experience for users, on large screens or Wear OS! Here’s what you need to know to get started:

Get your apps ready for foldables, like the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4

With their unique foldable experience, the Galaxy Z Flip4 and Z Fold4 are great examples of how Android devices come in all shapes and sizes. The Z Fold4 is the latest in large screen devices, a category that continues to see impressive growth. Active large screen users are approaching 270 million, making it a great time to optimize your apps for tablets, foldables and Chrome OS.

Last year, we launched Android 12L, a feature drop designed to make Android 12 even better on tablets and foldable devices, and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold4 will be the first device to run 12L out of the box! Android 12L includes UI updates tailor-made for large screens, improvements to the multitasking experience, and enhancements to compatibility mode so your app looks better out of the box. Since 12L, we also launched Android 13, which includes all these large screen updates and more.

Get started building for foldables by checking out the documentation. The Z Fold4 and Z Flip4 can be used in multiple different folded states, like Samsung’s “flex mode” where you can go hands-free when doing anything from watching a show to taking a photo. To get your app looking great however it’s folded, you can use the Jetpack WindowManager library to make your app fold aware and test your app on foldables. And finally, the large screen app quality guidelines is a comprehensive set of checklists to help make your app the best it can be across an ever expanding ecosystem of large screen devices.

Developers who put in this work are starting to see results; eBay increased their app rating to 4.7 stars on Google Play after optimizing for large screens. Chrome's multitasking usage increased 18x for large screens with 12L.


Build exceptional Wear OS apps

The Wear OS platform expanded this week with the new and improved Galaxy Watch5 series. This lineup of devices builds on Samsung’s commitment to the wearable platform, which we saw last year when they launched Wear OS Powered by Samsung on the Galaxy Watch4 series.

If you’re looking to get started building for the latest Galaxy Watch 5 series, or any other Wear OS device, now is a great time to check out version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS. This is the first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to make building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive. The toolkit brings the best of Jetpack Compose to Wear OS, accelerating the development process so you can create beautiful apps with fewer lines of code.

The 1.0 release streamlines UI development by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax. It also provides a rich set of UI components optimized for the watch experience and is accompanied by many powerful tools in Android Studio to streamline UI iteration. That’s why Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps.

We’ve built a set of materials to help you get started with Compose for Wear OS! Check out our curated learning pathway for a step-by-step journey, documentation including a quick start guide, the Compose for Wear OS codelab for hands-on experience, and samples available on Github.

Similarly to Compose for Wear OS, we’re building Wear OS Tile Components to make it faster and easier to build tiles. Tiles provide Wear OS users glanceable access to the information and actions they need in order to get things done quickly and they are one of the most used features on Wear OS. This update brings material components and layouts so you can create Tiles that embrace the latest Material design for Wear OS. Right now this is in beta, but keep a lookout for the launch announcement!

Another launch announcement to watch out for is Android Studio Dolphin, the latest release from Android Studio. Check out these features designed to make wearable app development easier:
  • Updated Wear OS emulator toolbar which now includes buttons and gestures available on Wear OS devices, such as palm and tilting and simulating two physical buttons.
  • Emulator pairing assistant to pair multiple Wear OS devices with a single virtual or physical phone. Android Studio remembers pairings after being closed and allows you to see Wear devices in the Device Manager.
  • Direct surface launch that allows you to create run/debug configurations for Wear OS tiles, watch faces, and complications, and launch them directly from Android Studio.
Between Jetpack Compose, Tile Components and Android Studio Dolphin, we are simplifying Wear OS app development. And, with the addition of the Galaxy Watch5 series to the Wear OS ecosystem, there are even more reasons to build an exceptional Wear OS app.


There’s never been a better time to start optimizing!

Form factors are having a major moment this year and Google is committed to helping you optimize and build across form factors with new content and tools, including sessions and workshops from this year’s Google I/O and new Android Studio features. Plus, we have Material Design guidance for large screens and Wear OS to help you in your optimization journey.

From the Watch5 series to the Z Fold4, Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked brought us innovations across screen sizes and types. Prepare your app so it looks great across the entire Android device ecosystem!

Compose for Wear OS is now 1.0: time to build wearable apps with Compose!

Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Android Developer Relations Engineer

Today we’re launching version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS, the first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help developers create beautiful, responsive apps for Google’s smartwatch platform.

Compose for Wear OS was built from the bottom up in Kotlin with assumptions of modern app architecture. It makes building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax.

The toolkit not only simplifies UI development, but also provides a rich set of UI components optimized for the watch experience with built-in support of Material design for Wear OS, and it’s accompanied by many powerful tools in Android Studio to streamline UI iteration.

What this means

The Compose for Wear OS 1.0 release means that the API is stable and has what you need to build production-ready apps. Moving forward, Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps.

Your feedback has helped shape the development of Compose for Wear OS; our developer community has been with us each step of the way, engaging with us on Slack and providing feedback on the APIs, components, and tooling. As we are working on bringing new features to future versions of Compose for Wear OS, we will continue to welcome developer feedback and suggestions.

We are also excited to share how developers have already adopted Compose in their Wear OS apps and what they like about it.

What developers are saying

Todoist helps people organize, plan and collaborate on projects. They are one of the first companies to completely rebuild their Wear OS app using Compose and redesign all screens and interactions:

“When the new Wear design language and Compose for Wear OS were announced, we were thrilled. It gave us new motivation and opportunity to invest into the platform.”

Todoist application
Relying on Compose for Wear OS has improved both developer and user experience for Todoist:

“Compose for Wear OS helped us tremendously both on the development side and the design side. The guides and documentation made it easy for our product designers to prepare mockups matching the new design language of the platform. And the libraries made it very easy for us to implement these, providing all the necessary widgets and customizations. Swipe to dismiss, TimeText, ScalingLazyList were all components that worked very well out-of-the-box for us, while still allowing us to make a recognizable and distinct app.”


Outdooractive helps people plan routes for hiking, cycling, running, and other outdoor adventures. As wearables are a key aspect of their product strategy, they have been quick to update their offering with an app for the user's wrist.
Outdooractive application
Outdooractive has already embraced Wear OS 3, and by migrating to Compose for Wear OS they aimed for developer-side benefits such as having a modern code base and increased development productivity:

“Huge improvement is how lists are created. Thanks to ScalingLazyColumn it is easier (compared to RecyclerView) to create scrolling screens without wasting resources. Availability of standard components like Chip helps saving time by being able to use pre-fabricated design-/view-components. What would have taken us days now takes us hours.”

The Outdooractive team also highlighted that Compose for Wear OS usage help them to strive for better app quality:

“Improved animations were a nice surprise, allowing smoothly hiding/revealing components by just wrapping components in “AnimatedVisibility” for example, which we used in places where we would normally not have invested any time in implementing animations.”


Another developer we’ve been working with, Period Tracker helps keep track of period cycles, ovulation, and the chance of conception.

     
Period Tracker application

They have taken advantage of our UI toolkit to significantly improve user interface and quickly develop new features available exclusively on Wear OS:

“Compose for Wear OS provided us with many kits to help us bring our designs to life. For example, we used Chips to design the main buttons for period recording, water drinking, and taking medication, and it also helped us create a unique look for the latest version of Kegel workout.”

Similarly to other developers, Period Tracker noted that Compose for Wear OS helped them to achieve better developer experience and improved collaboration with design and development teams:

“For example, before Chips components were available, we had to use a custom way to load images on buttons which caused a lot of adaptation work. Yes, Compose for Wear OS improved our productivity and made our designers more willing to design a better user experience on wearables.”

Check out the in-depth case studies to learn more about how other developers are using Jetpack Compose.

1.0 release

Let’s look into the key features available with 1.0 release:

  • Material: The Compose Material catalog for Wear OS already offers more components than are available with View-based layouts. The components follow material styling and also implement material theming, which allows you to customize the design for your brand.
  • Declarative: Compose for Wear OS leverages Modern Android Development and works seamlessly with other Jetpack libraries. Compose-based UIs in most cases result in less code and accelerate the development process as a whole, read more.
  • Interoperable: If you have an existing Wear OS app with a large View-based codebase, it's possible to gradually adopt Compose for Wear OS by using the Compose Interoperability APIs rather than having to rewrite the whole codebase.
  • Handles different watch shapes: Compose for Wear OS extends the foundation of Compose, adding a DSL for all curved elements to make it easy to develop for all Wear OS device shapes: round, square, or rectangular with minimal code.
  • Performance: Each Compose for Wear OS library ships with its own baseline profiles that are automatically merged and distributed with your app’s APK and are compiled ahead of time on device. In most cases, this achieves app performance for production builds that is on-par with View-based apps. However, it’s important to know how to configure, develop, and test your app’s performance for the best results. Learn more.

Note that using version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.2 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.0. Read more about Jetpack Compose 1.2 release here.

Tools and libraries

Android Studio

The declarative paradigm shift also alters the development workflow. The Compose tooling available in Android Studio will help you build apps more productively.

Android Studio Dolphin includes a new project template with Compose for Wear OS to help you get started.

The Composable Preview annotation allows you to instantly verify how your app’s layout behaves on different watch shapes and sizes. You can configure the device preview to show different Wear OS device types (round, rectangle, etc):

import androidx.compose.ui.tooling.preview


@Preview(

    device = Devices.WEAR_OS_LARGE_ROUND,

    showSystemUi = true,

    backgroundColor = 0xff000000,

    showBackground = true

)

@Composable

fun PreviewCustomComposable() {

    CustomComposable(...)

}

Starting with Android Studio Electric Eel, Live Edit supports iterative code development for Wear OS, providing quick feedback as you make changes in the editor and immediately reflecting UI in the Preview or running app on the device.

Horologist

Horologist is a group of open-source libraries from Google that supplement Wear OS development, which we announced with the beta release of Compose for Wear OS. Horologist has graduated a number of experimental APIs to stable including TimeText fadeAway modifiers, WearNavScaffold, the Date and Time pickers.

      
Date and Time pickers from Horologist library     

Learning Compose

If you are unfamiliar with using Jetpack Compose, we recommend starting with the tutorial. Many of the development principles there also apply to Compose for Wear OS.

To learn more about Compose for Wear OS check out:

Now that Compose for Wear OS has reached its first stable release, it’s time to create beautiful apps built for the wrist with Compose!

Join the community

Join the discussion in the Kotlin Slack #compose-wear channel to connect with the team and other developers and share what you’re building.

Provide feedback

Please keep providing us feedback on the issue tracker and let us know your experience!

For more information about building apps for Wear OS, check out the developer site.

13 Things to know for Android developers at Google I/O!

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director of Android Developer Relations

Android I/O updates: Jetpack, Wear OS, etc 

There aren’t many platforms where you can build something and instantly reach billions of people around the world, not only on their phones—but their TVs, cars, tablets, watches, and more. Today, at Google I/O, we covered a number of ways Android helps you make the most of this opportunity, and how Modern Android Development brings as much commonality as possible, to make it faster and easier for you to create experiences that tailor to all the different screens we use in our daily lives.

We’ve rounded up the top 13 things to know for Android developers—from Jetpack Compose to tablets to Wear OS and of course… Android 13! And stick around for Day 2 of Google I/O, when Android’s full track of 26 technical talks and 4 workshops drop. We’re also bringing back the Android fireside Q&A in another episode of #TheAndroidShow; tweet us your questions now using #AskAndroid, and we’ve assembled a team of experts to answer live on-air, May 12 at 12:30PM PT.


MODERN ANDROID DEVELOPMENT

#1: Jetpack Compose Beta 1.2, with support for more advanced use cases

Android’s modern UI toolkit, Jetpack Compose, continues to bring the APIs you need to support more advanced use cases like downloadable fonts, LazyGrids, window insets, nested scrolling interop and more tooling support with features like LiveEdit, Recomposition Debugging and Animation Preview. Check out the blog post for more details.

Jetpack Compose 1.2 Beta  

#2: Android Studio: introducing Live Edit

Get more done faster with Android Studio Dolphin Beta and Electric Eel Canary! Android Studio Dolphin includes new features and improvements for Jetpack Compose and Wear OS development and an updated Logcat experience. Android Studio Electric Eel comes with integrations with the new Google Play SDK Index and Firebase Crashlytics. It also offers a new resizable emulator to test your app on large screens and the new Live Edit feature to immediately deploy code changes made within composable functions. Watch the What’s new in Android Development Tools session and read the Android Studio I/O blog post here.

#3: Baseline Profiles - speed up your app load time!

The speed of your app right after installation can make a big difference on user retention. To improve that experience, we created Baseline Profiles. Baseline Profiles allow apps and libraries to provide the Android runtime with metadata about code path usage, which it uses to prioritize ahead-of-time compilation. We've seen up to 30% faster app startup times thanks to adding baseline profiles alone, no other code changes required! We’re already using baseline profiles within Jetpack: we’ve added baselines to popular libraries like Fragments and Compose – to help provide a better end-user experience. Watch the What’s new in app performance talk, and read the Jetpack blog post here.

Modern Android Development 

BETTER TOGETHER

#4: Going big on Android tablets

Google is all in on tablets. Since last I/O we launched Android 12L, a release focused on large screen optimizations, and Android 13 includes all those improvements and more. We also announced the Pixel tablet, coming next year. With amazing new hardware, an updated operating system & Google apps, improved guidelines and libraries, and exciting changes to the Play store, there has never been a better time to review your apps and get them ready for large screens and Android 13. That’s why at this year’s I/O we have four talks and a workshop to take you from design to implementation for large screens.


#5: Wear OS: Compose + more!

With the latest updates to Wear OS, you can rethink what is possible when developing for wearables. Jetpack Compose for Wear OS is now in beta, so you can create beautiful Wear OS apps with fewer lines of code. Health Services is also now in beta, bringing a ton of innovation to the health and fitness developer community. And last, but certainly not least, we announced the launch of The Google Pixel Watch - coming this Fall - which brings together the best of Fitbit and Wear OS. You can learn more about all the most exciting updates for wearables by watching the Wear OS technical session and reading our Jetpack Compose for Wear OS announcement.

Compose for Wear OS 

#6: Introducing Health Connect

Health Connect is a new platform built in close collaboration between Google and Samsung, that simplifies connectivity between apps making it easier to reach more users with less work, so you can securely access and share user health and fitness data across apps and devices. Today, we’re opening up access to Health Connect through Jetpack Health—read our announcement or watch the I/O session to find out more!

#7: Android for Cars & Android TV OS

Android for Cars and Android TV OS continue to grow in the US and abroad. As more users drive connected or tune-in, we’re introducing new features to make it even easier to develop apps for cars and TV this year. Catch the “What’s new with Android for Cars” and “What's new with Google TV and Android TV” sessions on Day 2 (May 12th) at 9:00 AM PT to learn more.

#8: Add Voice Across Devices

We’re making it easier for users to access your apps via voice across devices with Google Assistant, by expanding developer access to Shortcuts API for Android for Cars, with support for Wear OS apps coming later this year. We’re also making it easier to build those experiences with Smarter Custom Intents, enabling Assistant to better detect broader instances of user queries through ML, without any NLU training heavy lift. Additionally, we’re introducing improvements that drive discovery to your apps via voice on Mobile, first through Brandless Queries, that drive app usage even when the user hasn’t explicitly said your app’s name, and App Install Suggestions that appear if your isn’t installed yet–these are automatically enabled for existing App Actions today.


AND THE LATEST FROM ANDROID, PLAY, AND MORE:

#9: What’s new in Play!

Get the latest updates from Google Play, including new ways Play can help you grow your business. Highlights include the ability to deep-link and create up to 50 custom listings; our LiveOps beta, which will allow more developers to submit content to be considered for featuring on the Play Store; and even more flexibility in selling subscriptions. Learn about these updates and more in our blog post.

#10: Google Play SDK Index

Evaluate if an SDK is right for your app with the new Google Play SDK index. This new public portal lists over 100 of the most widely used commercial SDKs and information like which app permissions the SDK requests, statistics on the apps that use them, and which version of the SDK is most popular. Learn more on our blog post and watch “What’s new in Google Play” and “What’s new in Android development tools” sessions.

#11: Privacy Sandbox on Android

Privacy Sandbox on Android provides a path for new advertising solutions to improve user privacy without putting access to free content and services at risk. We recently released the first Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview so you can get an early look at the SDK Runtime and Topics API. You can conduct preliminary testing of these new technologies, evaluate how you might adopt them for your solutions, and share feedback with us.

#12: The new Google Wallet API

The new Google Wallet gives users fast and secure access to everyday essentials across Android and Wear OS. We’re enhancing the Google Wallet API, previously called Google Pay Passes API, to support generic passes, grouping and mixing passes together, for example grouping an event ticket with a voucher, and launching a new Android SDK which allows you to save passes directly from your app without a backend integration. To learn more, read the full blog post, watch the session, or read the docs at developers.google.com/wallet.

#13: And of course, Android 13!

The second Beta of Android 13 is available today! Get your apps ready for the latest features for privacy and security, like the new notification permission, the privacy-protecting photo picker, and improved permissions for pairing with nearby devices and accessing media files. Enhance your app with features like app-specific language support and themed app icons. Build with modern standards like HDR video and Bluetooth LE Audio. You can get started by enrolling your Pixel device here, or try Android 13 Beta on select phones, tablets, and foldables from our partners - visit developer.android.com/13 to learn more.

That’s just a snapshot of some of the highlights for Android developers at this year’s Google I/O. Be sure to watch the What’s New in Android talk to get the landscape on the full Android technical track at Google I/O, which includes 26 talks and 4 workshops. Enjoy!

Announcing Compose for Wear OS Beta!

Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Developer Relations Engineer, and John Nichol, Tech Lead of Compose for Wear OS

Wear OS watch with blue background 

Today we’re launching the Beta release of Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help developers create beautiful user experiences for Wear OS.

Compose for Wear OS adds support for watch optimized components that embrace the latest Material design for Wear OS. The components are built on top of core Compose libraries and the toolkit leverages Modern Android Development, helping accelerate the development process as a whole.

With this Beta release, Compose for Wear OS is feature complete for the 1.0 release coming later this year, and has what you need to build production-ready apps. It also means the API is stable; moving forward we'll focus on performance and polishing existing components for the 1.0 release.


In the Beta

We’ve been hard at work since last I/O to bring the best of Jetpack Compose to Wear OS, engaging with the community via Slack, gathering developer feedback on APIs, components and tooling. As a result, we’ve improved a number of components such as navigation, scaling lazy lists, input and gesture support and much more.

The first Beta release follows 21 alpha releases. The major changes since the Developer Preview announcement include:


? Input components

You asked for user input components, so we’ve added different composables that you can tailor for your watch app:

GIF of picker, slider, and stepper options
  • Picker lets the user select an item from a scrolling list. By default, the list of selectable items is repeated 'infinitely' in both directions, to give the impression of a rotating cylinder seen from the side. Interestingly, Picker uses ScalingLazyColumn implementation underneath and has helped to develop and hone a lot of advanced ScalingLazyColumn features.
  • Slider allows users to make a selection from a range of values and is ideal for adjusting settings like font size or brightness.
  • Stepper is a full-screen control component that allows users to make a selection from a range of values. For example, users can control the volume of their headphones.

? Dialogs

We’ve added full-screen Alert and Confirmation composables that can be used as either navigation destinations or traditional full-screen Dialogs, which will be layered over any other content. Dialog supports swipe-to-dismiss and will reveal the parent content in the background during the swipe gesture.

GIF of watch face showing playlist options

For consistency with Scaffold, a full-screen dialog displays a PositionIndicator and a Vignette.


? Progress Indicator

We added CircularProgressIndicator, a progress indicator optimized for watch screens to display progress by animating an indicator along a circular track in a clockwise direction.

GIF of watch face showing timer

​​There are several options for how CircularProgressIndicator can be used: either to show infinite progress or to express the proportion of completion of an ongoing task. Progress Indicators allow a gap in the circular track which leaves room for other content, for instance TimeText if used in full-screen.


? Page Indicator

To help you implement pagination, the UI toolkit provides a HorizontalPageIndicator component that represents the total number of pages and selected page.

GIF of watch face showing page indicator

Depending on the screen shape, the HorizontalPageIndicator will provide a form factor- specific visual indication of which page is active and how far through the pages it is.


Improvements

  • ScalingLazyColumn: improved the default behavior to be consistent with Material design for Wear OS, such as updating the scaling parameters, default extra padding and taking the size from the size of its contents.
  • Scaffold: added PageIndicator slot to guarantee correct positioning on the round screen.
  • Navigation: ensured feature parity with Compose Navigation and adding support for edge swiping to enable a great experience on full-screen and page scrolling.
  • Curved elements: added CurvedModifiers and a new DSL which enables developers to use concepts that make sense for a curved world like radial, angular, sweep, (anti-) clockwise, inner/outer. CurvedLayout is the bridge between the linear and curved worlds and curvedComposable can be used to introduce traditional composable components when it makes sense to do so.

With these recent additions, the Compose Material catalog for Wear OS now has more components than are available with View-based layouts and provides out-of-the-box implementation of the new Wear OS design guidelines.


Tools

Android Studio Electric Eel provides the latest features for the best experience developing with Compose for Wear OS:

  • Editor and tooling support improving autocomplete and editor actions
  • Wear OS-specific Composable Preview
  • ? Live edit for real-time debugging support
  • ? Compose for Wear OS project template


Horologist

Today we’re also announcing the release of Horologist, a Google open source project which provides a set of Wear libraries that supplement the functionality provided by Compose for Wear OS and other Wear OS APIs.

Gears of a watch

Read about Horology

Horologist offers helpful Compose extensions:

  • Media UI components including playback control and volume screens
  • Material date and time pickers
  • Navigation-aware Scaffold with TimeText and PositionIndicator that stay in sync with scrolling and navigation screen changes.

Horologist will grow to provide developers with additional tools for building great Wear OS apps across different experiences. Check out the Horologist on Github to provide feedback and contribute general functionality that could be useful for Wear developers - and stay tuned for upcoming releases!


Get Started

Many of the development principles for mobile Compose apply to Compose for Wear OS, so if you’re unfamiliar with the UI toolkit start with Jetpack Compose basics.

We’ve prepared a set of materials to help you get started with Compose for Wear OS:

Now that Compose for Wear OS has reached Beta it’s a great time to get started with Compose to quickly bring your app to life or refresh your existing UI. For more information about building apps for Wear OS, check out the developer site.

We’d love to hear from you about your experiences using Compose for Wear OS and what you are able to build! Join the discussion in the Kotlin Slack #compose-wear channel and please keep providing feedback on the issue tracker.

Happy Composing!

Living in a multi-device world with Android

Android has grown into the most popular OS in the world, delivering access, connectivity and information to people everywhere on their smartphones. There are over three billion active monthly Android devices around the world, and in the last year alone, more than a billion new Android phones have been activated. While the phone is still the most popular form of computing, people are adding more connected technologies to their lives like TVs, cars, watches and more.

As we build for a multi-device future, we’re introducing new ways to get more done. Whether it's your phone or your other devices, our updates help them all work better together.

Do more with your Android phone

With Android 13, we’re making updates to privacy and security, personalization and large screen devices. You’ve already seen a preview of this in the Developer Previews and first beta. Across the Android ecosystem, we’re also bringing more ways to keep your conversations private and secure, store your digital identity and get you help in the physical world.

We have been working with carriers and phone makers around the world to upgrade SMS text messaging to a new standard called Rich Communication Services (RCS). With RCS, you can share high-quality photos, see type indicators, message over Wi-Fi and get a better group messaging experience.

This is a huge step forward for the mobile ecosystem and we are really excited about the progress! In fact, Google's Messages app already has half a billion monthly active users with RCS and is growing fast. And, Messages already offers end-to-end encryption for your one-to-one conversations. Later this year, we’ll also be bringing encryption to your group conversations to open beta.

Three messages are shown from a group message between friends who are excited for a baking class they will take together.

Your phone can also help provide secure access to your everyday essentials. Recently, we’ve witnessed the rapid digitization of things like car keys and vaccine records. The new Google Wallet on Android will standardize the way you save and access these important items, plus things like payment cards, transit and event tickets, boarding and loyalty passes and student IDs. We’ll be launching Google Wallet on Wear OS, starting with support for payment cards.

Soon, you’ll be able to save and access hotel keys and office badges from your Android phone. And we know you can’t leave home without your ID, so we're collaborating with states across the U.S. and international partners to bring digital driver's licenses and IDs to Google Wallet later this year.

We’re developing smooth integrations with other Google apps and services while providing granular privacy controls. For example, when you add a transit card to Wallet, your card and balance will automatically show up in Google Maps when you search for directions. If your balance is running low, you can quickly tap and add fare before you arrive at the station.

A user looks at their phone for directions from the San Francisco airport on Google Maps. Since they are looking for public transportation routes, they are prompted on their phone to add fare to their Clipper card, a transit card used throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. With a tap, they add their desired amount of money to the card.

Beyond helping keep your communication and digital identities safe, your devices can be even more essential in critical moments like medical emergencies or natural disasters. In these times, chances are you’ll have either your phone or watch on you. We built critical infrastructure into Android like Emergency Location Services (ELS) to help first responders locate you when you call for help. We recently launched ELS in Bulgaria, Paraguay, Spain and Saudi Arabia, and it is now available to more than one billion people worldwide.

Early Earthquake Warnings are already in place in 25 countries, and this year we’ll launch them in many of the remaining high-risk regions around the world. This year, we’ll also start working with partners to bring Emergency SOS to Wear OS, so you can instantly contact a trusted friend or family member or call emergency services from your watch.

A watch screen depicts the Emergency SOS feature. The watch face has an outline of a red circle that counts down the time before an emergency call is made directly from the watch. In this example 911 is called.

Apps and services that extend beyond the phone

Along with your phone, two of the most important and personal devices in our lives are watches and tablets.

With the launch of our unified platform with Samsung last year, there are now over three times as many active Wear OS devices as there were last year. Later this year, you’ll start to see more devices powered with Wear OS from Samsung, Fossil Group, Montblanc, Mobvoi and others. And for the first time ever, Google Assistant is coming to Samsung Galaxy watches, starting soon with the Watch4 series. The Google Assistant experience for Wear OS has been improved with faster, more natural voice interactions, so you can access useful features like voice-controlled navigation or setting reminders.

We’re also bringing more of your favorite apps to Wear OS. Check out experiences built for your wrist by Spotify, adidas Running, LINE and KakaoTalk. And you’ll see many more from apps like SoundCloud and Deezer later this year.

Various app logos including Spotify, adidas Running, LINE, and more are spread out in a circle outside of a watch.

We’re investing in tablets in a big way and have made updates to the interface in 12L and Android 13 that optimize information for the larger screen. We’ve also introduced new features that help you multitask — for example, tap the toolbar to view the app tray and drag and drop apps to view them in a side by side view.

To support these system-level updates, we’ve also been working to improve the app experiences on Android tablets. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be updating more than 20 Google apps to take full advantage of the extra space including YouTube Music, Google Maps, Messages and more.

A collage of colorful tablets are shown, each tablet with a different app running on its screen such as Google Translate, Google Maps, Google TV, Google Photos, Gmail, and more. The Android logo is in the center of the image with the text “20+ optimized Google tablet apps” written in large lettering.

We’re working with other apps to revamp their experiences this year as well, including TikTok, Zoom, Facebook and many others. You’ll soon be able to easily search for all tablet-optimized apps thanks to updates to Google Play.

The Google Play app is open on a tablet. Apps like TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Zoom are listed under the “Top Free” section of the app charts, each with an Install button beside it.

Simple ways for your devices to work better together

Getting things done can be much easier if your connected devices all communicate and work together. The openness and flexibility of Android powers phones, watches, tablets, TVs and cars — and it works well with devices like headphones, speakers, laptops and more. Across all these devices, we’re building on our efforts and introducing even more simple and helpful features to move throughout your day.

With Chromecast built-in, you can watch videos, listen to music and more on the device that makes sense depending on where you are and what you’re doing. This means after your daily commute, you can easily play the rest of a movie you were watching on your phone on your TV at home. To help you stay entertained, we’re working to extend casting capabilities to new partners and products, such as Chromebook, or even your car.

An interior of a car with YouTube video being cast from a phone to the in-car display.

Your media should just move with you, so you can automatically switch audio from your headphones while watching a movie on your tablet to your phone when answering an incoming call.

And when you need to get more done across devices, you’ll soon be able to copy a URL or picture from your phone, and paste it on your tablet.

This graphic begins with a user copying an image from the web on their phone. They select the Nearby Share icon and the image from the phone is now in the clipboard of their tablet. The user then clicks paste within a slide in Google Slides on their tablet and the image from the phone appears.

Earlier this year, we previewed multi-device experiences, like expanding Phone Hub on your Chromebook to allow you to access all your phone’s messaging apps. By streaming from your phone to the laptop, you’ll be able to send and reply to messages, view your conversation history and launch your messaging apps from your laptop. We’re also making it easier to set up and pair your devices with the expansion of Fast Pair support to more devices, including built-in support for Matter on Android.

Whether Android brings new possibilities to your phone or the many devices in your life, we’re looking forward to helping you in this multi-device world.