Posted by Hoi Lam, Lead Developer Advocate, Wear OS by Google
Today we announced that we are evolving the design of Wear OS by Google to help you get the most out of your time - providing quicker access to your information and notifications. Notifications can come from the automatic bridging of the phone's notification or be generated by a local Wear app running on the watch. Whether you are a phone developer, a Wear app developer, or both, there are a few things you will need to know about the new notification stream.
Until now, each notification took up the entire screen in Wear OS. Although this provided more space to include things like inline action, it also meant it took a long time for the user to go through all their notifications. The new notification stream is more compact, and can display multiple notifications on the same screen. This means users can process their notification streams more quickly.
setColor
setDisplayIntent
setHintDisplayActionInline
As always, the current best practices for notification still apply. In particular, for messaging apps developers, we strongly encourage the use of MessagingStyle notification and enabling on-device Smart Reply through setAllowGeneratedReplies.
setAllowGeneratedReplies
We will start rolling these changes out in the next month, so watch for updates on your Wear OS by Google smartwatch!