Compose for Wear OS 1.1 is now stable: check out new features!

To give you additional ability to customize the user interface, we added outlined styles for Chips and Buttons. New OutlinedChip and OutlinedButton composables provide a transparent component with a thin border that can be used for medium-emphasis actions. Also available for compact versions: OutlinedCompactChip and OutlinedCompactButton.

Starting from version 1.1, you can also modify shapes for Chip/ToggleChip and Button/ToggleButton components using new functions overloads.

Placeholder API

A new experimental API has been added to implement placeholder support. This can be used to achieve three distinct visual effects separately or all together:

• A placeholder background brush effect used in containers such as Chip and Cards to draw over the normal background when waiting for content to load.
• A Modifier.placeholder() to draw a stadium shaped placeholder widget over the top of content that is being loaded.
• A Modifier.placeholderShimmer() for gradient/shimmer effect that is drawn over the top of the other effects to indicate to users that the current state is waiting for data to load.

Check out the reference docs and sample in Horologist to see how to apply the placeholder to common use cases, such as a Chip with icon and a label that puts placeholder over individual content slots and draws a placeholder shimmer on top while waiting for data to load.

Modifier.scrollAway

Horologist’s fadeAway modifier has been graduated to scrollAway modifier in version 1.1. Modifier.scrollAway scrolls an item vertically in and out of view, based on the scroll state, and already has overloads to work with Column, LazyColumn and ScalingLazyColumn.

Additional parameters in CurvedTextStyle

CurvedTextStyle now supports additional parameters (fontFamily, fontWeight, fontStyle, fontSynthesis) to specify font details when creating a curved text style. Extended curved text style can be used on both curvedText and basicCurvedText.

UX and accessibility improvements

The 1.1 release also focuses on bringing a refined user experience, improvements for TalkBack support and overall better accessibility:

• ToggleChip and SplitToggleChip support usage of animated toggle controls (Checkbox, Switch and RadioButton) that can be used instead of the static icons provided by ToggleChipDefaults.
• Default gradient colors for Chip/ToggleChip and Cards were adjusted to match the latest UX specification.
• Updated a number of the default colors in the MaterialTheme to improve accessibility as the original colors did not have sufficient contrast.
• Accessibility improvements to Picker so that multi-picker screens are navigable with screen readers and the content description is accessible.
• InlineSlider and Stepper now have button roles, so that TalkBack can recognize them as buttons.
• The PositionIndicator in Scaffold is now positioned and sized so that it only takes the space needed. This is useful when semantic information is added to it, so TalkBack gets the correct bounds of the PositionIndicator on screen.

It’s time ⌚ to bring your app to the wrist!

Get started

To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started with hands-on experience trying our codelab, and make sure to check out the documentation and samples. Visit Compose for Wear OS release notes for full list of changes available in version 1.1.

Note that using version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.3 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.10. Check out the Compose to Kotlin Compatibility Map for more information.

Provide feedback

Compose for Wear OS continues to evolve with the features you’ve been asking for. Please do continue providing us feedback on the issue tracker and join Kotlin Slack #compose-wear channel to connect with the Google team and dev community.

We’re excited to see a growing number of apps using Compose for Wear OS in production, and we’re grateful for all issues and requests that help us to make the toolkit better!

Start building for Wear OS now

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