Android Wear Beta

Posted by Hoi Lam, Lead Developer
Advocate, Android Wear

LG Watch Sport

Today, we are launching the beta of the next Android Wear update. As we
mentioned at Google I/O, this will mainly be a technical upgrade to API 26 with
enhancements to background limits and notification channels. LG Watch Sport
users can go to this webpage to sign up and the factory image will automatically be downloaded to the watch you enroll. As this is a beta, please be sure to review the known issues before enrolling. If you don't have a watch to test on, you can use the Android emulator. For
developers working with href="https://developer.android.com/training/wearables/apps/creating-app-china.html">Android
Wear for China, an updated emulator image is also available.

Notification Channels

In this update, users can choose the types of notifications they receive via an
app through href="https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html#ManageChannels">notification
channels. This gives users finer-grained control than muting all
notifications from the app. For notifications generated locally by Android Wear
apps, users will be able to customise the notifications channel they want to
see, right on their watch. Please refer to href="https://github.com/googlesamples/android-WearNotifications">the Wear
notification sample for more details. For notifications bridged from the
phone, the phone notifications channel settings will dictate what is shown on
the watch.

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.O) {
    mNotificationManager.createNotificationChannel(
        NotificationChannel("1001", "New Follower",
            NotificationManager.IMPORTANCE_DEFAULT))

    mNotificationManager.createNotificationChannel(
        NotificationChannel("1002", "Likes",
            NotificationManager.IMPORTANCE_LOW))
}

Background Limits

There are increased restrictions on href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background.html">background
services. Developers should assume services can no longer run in the
background without a visible notification. In addition, the background location
update frequency will be reduced. Battery-saving best practices such as using
href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/job/JobScheduler.html">JobScheduler
should be adopted to ensure your app is battery-efficient and able to perform
background tasks when possible.

Please give us your feedback

We expect this to be the only beta release before the final production release.
Thank you for your feedback so far. Please submit any bugs you find via the href="https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/new?component=192711&template=840908">Android
Wear issue tracker. The earlier you submit them, the higher the likelihood
that we can include the fixes in the final release.