Wear 2.0 launched back in February with added support for new hardware features in addition to adopting new Material Design themes, guidelines, and a simpler vertical UI pattern. It also introduces a complications API, making it easier for apps to provide data to watch faces, and watch faces to incorporate external data. The final big update was that, apps targeting Wear 2.0 now have the ability to operate in a standalone mode, without needing a connection to a companion app on the phone.
There are a few design considerations in relation to navigation, notifications, the complications API, and the standalone functionality to help you better optimize for Wear 2.0 devices:
Ensure that for devices using Wear 2.0, your app takes advantage of these new UI patterns to provide a consistent user experience. Check out more training resources for Wear Navigation and Actions and the Material Design specifications for Navigation and Action Drawers.
Wear 2.0 uses a simpler vertical navigation pattern, removing the horizontal swiping gesture to present actions for a notification. Notification actions are now presented as a single primary action (if applicable) at the bottom of a notification. If there is no primary action, expanding the notification will present options in a single, vertically scrollable view.
Notifications will work without needing many changes on both 1.x and 2.0 devices, but appear quite different:
When creating apps for Wear 2.0 devices, improve the user experience with notifications by applying the following best practices:
To learn more about adding wearable features to notifications.
The complications API in Wear 2.0 makes it much easier for watch face developers and third-party data providers to surface important information users want, at a glance. Watch faces that support the API can be configured to use any of the data providers that have been installed on the watch while maintaining complete control over their appearance. Apps supporting the complication API allow the app's data to be accessible on any watch faces that support complications. These complications can be displayed in a variety of forms (short text, icon, ranged value, long text, small image, and large image) depending on what the data provider has configured and how much space has been allocated on the watch face.
To ensure that complications fit the overall design of the watch face and properly handle their data type, when adding complication support we recommend watch face makers should:
TextRenderer
ComplicationDrawable
ComplicationProviderService
ComplicationData
Though a lot was covered here, there are additional resources you can use to ensure that your apps or games are optimized and use the latest patterns and functionality on Wear. Be sure to review the quality guidelines and check out the developer training documentation to learn more best practices for wearable app development and wearable app design in order to build quality apps for Wear.
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