Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Developer Relations Engineer, and John Nichol, Tech Lead of Compose for Wear OS
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.
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:
You asked for user input components, so we’ve added different composables that you can tailor for your watch app:
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.
For consistency with Scaffold, a full-screen dialog displays a PositionIndicator and a Vignette.
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.
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.
To help you implement pagination, the UI toolkit provides a HorizontalPageIndicator component that represents the total number of pages and selected page.
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.
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.
Android Studio Electric Eel provides the latest features for the best experience developing with Compose for Wear OS:
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.
Read about Horology
Horologist offers helpful Compose extensions:
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!
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!
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