Tag Archives: Wearables

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:

What’s happening in Wear OS by Google

Posted by Karen Ng, Director of Product and Robert Simpson, Product Manager

This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid. For each week, we’re diving into a key area and this week we’re focusing on Android Beyond Phones. Today, we’ll share what’s happening with Wear OS by Google.

Wearable technologies help people lead healthier lives and connect with important, timely information. Today, we're sharing our areas of investment focusing on the fundamentals, bringing even more helpful experiences to more watches, and giving users more choice in a device ecosystem.

Focusing on fundamentals

Wearables are designed to instantly connect people with what's important throughout the day. That's why we're focused on fundamentals like performance and power.

In the next OTA update coming in the fall, we’re improving performance by making it faster to access your info and start your apps. We’re simplifying the pairing process to make onboarding easier. You’ll see improvements to our SysUI for more intuitive controls for managing different watch modes and workouts. And with CPU core improvements, you’ll also see up to a 20% speed improvement in startup time for your apps.

Finally, we continue to support advancements in technology to bring new functionality, such as LTE, and expand levels of performance with the new Qualcomm® Snapdragon Wear™ 4100 and 4100+ platforms. We are excited by the kinds of wearable experiences that can be enabled in the future.

More helpful experiences

Wearables showcase important information at a glance. Some of the most used features of Wear OS by Google are hands-free timers and tracking fitness metrics. In response to COVID-19, we built a handwashing timer that helps ensure users practice good hygiene.

And later this year, you’ll see a beautiful new weather experience for Wear OS by Google. It aims to be easier to read while on the go, with an hourly breakdown of today’s weather to help you plan ahead and provide information about important weather alerts in your area.

Wearable OS image Wearable OS image Wearable OS image

We’re always imagining new ways wearables can help people stay healthy, present and connected. Stay tuned for more in 2021!

More choice than ever

We’re excited to welcome new watch OEMs to the Wear OS by Google family -- Oppo, Suunto, and Xiaomi. This means new watches that fit your style and needs -- such as the Suunto 7 with rich sports capabilities, or the new LTE watches from Oppo that will keep you connected on the go.

Bringing the best of Android to wearables

We’re also working to bring the best of Android 11 to wearables. Many of the things you’ve seen in modern Android development -- from Android Studio, a great language with Kotlin, and Jetpack libraries to make common tasks easier will be part of what you can expect as a developer building wearable apps. We’ve just released a release candidate for androidx.wear 1.1.0, and would love feedback on things you’d like to see as you get started building a wearable app.

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