April 2, 2014

Android Wear Developer Preview

Last month, Google announced Android Wear, Android's platform for wearable devices, and the Android Wear Developer Preview. This preview is not intended for production use because it will no longer be supported after the official SDK is released, which will probably be announced in Google I/O 2014 happening on June 25-26.

To get started with the Android Wear Developer Preview, you must first signup at http://developer.android.com/wear/preview/signup.html. You can then download the Android Wear Support Library and sample codes, and you will be given access to the Android Wear Preview app on Google Play.

Download the Android Wear ARM EABI v7a System Image using the Android SDK Manager. It is available under Android 4.4.2. When creating a smart watch emulator, you can choose between AndroidWearSquare or AndroidWearRound depending on the display you want. The target should be Android 4.4.2 and the CPU/ABI should be Android Wear ARM (armeabi-v7a).

If you already have installed the Android Wear Preview app, open it and check the notification access in the settings. To connect the Android Wear emulator to the app, go to your command line terminal, navigate to your Android SDK's platform-tools directory and execute adb -d forward tcp:5601 tcp:5601.

The Android Wear support library must also be added to your Android project. You can try this with the sample codes included in the download

For more information, you can check out the Android Wear website, join the Android Wear Developers Google+ community at http://g.co/androidweardev, or watch the Android Wear DevBytes playlist: