With nearly half a billion cars, TVs, watches and laptops running on Android, it’s more important than ever for applications to work seamlessly on every device. This year at I / O, we renewed our focus on form factors and announced major updates for Wear OS and Large Screens. To help you get to the bottom of what’s new, here are the three things you need to know about form factors at Google I / O:
# 1: Building Wear OS and fitness programs is easier than ever
At I / O, we announced the Beta release of Compose for Wear OS, our modern explanatory UI toolkit designed to help developers build exceptional user experiences for Wear OS. Compose for Wear OS shares the basics and principles of Jetpack Compose, which helps simplify and accelerate UI development. In addition, Compose for Wear OS provides the Materials Catalog with components optimized for the watch experience.
We developed Compose for Wear OS with open source community feedback and participation. Since the Developer Preview, we’ve added and improved a number of components, such as navigation, scaling lists, import and gesture support, and many more. Compose for Wear OS has now completed feature for the upcoming 1.0 release and the API is stable – so you can start building beautiful, production-ready apps.
Health Services — the power-efficient and easy-to-use library for collecting real-time sensor data on smartwatches — will soon be available in beta and ready for production use. Health services enable applications to take advantage of modern smartwatch architecture, thus helping to conserve battery life while still delivering high frequency data. Since the alpha release last year, we’ve been working hard to improve performance and enhance the developer experience. We’ve also made some improvements to the API in response to your feedback.
If you have an existing health and fitness application for Wear OS that you would like to update, or have a brand new application in mind, we suggest you look at Health Service to provide the best experience for Wear 3 users and your prepare application for additional devices and sensors in the future. For example, this library will power all the Google and Fitbit health and fitness experiences on the recently announced Google Pixel Watch.
And last but not least, we’ve just introduced Health Connect. With Health Connect, users will be able to store health and fitness data securely on their phone and connect and share that data with some of their favorite health and fitness apps. Samsung Health, Google Fit and Fitbit integrate with Health Connect, along with many popular health and fitness applications. Health Connect is a common set of APIs for storing and sharing health data on Android phones. Developers can read data from and write to a data store on the device and we have standardized the scheme and API behavior, making it easy for you to use the data. We know how important the privacy of each user’s health data is, which is why we’ve centralized permissions and privacy controls – making it clear and simple for your users to manage and control this data.
# 2: Google is all-in on tablets
Google is going big on big screens with innovations in hardware, optimization in the operating system and a big investment in our application ecosystem. In the first quarter of this year, we saw active large screen users approach 270 million, making it a great time to optimize for tablets, foldable devices and Chrome OS.
Since the last I / O, we have introduced Android 12L, a feature loss that makes Android 12 even better on big screens. With Android 13, we include all these enhancements and more. Android 12L and 13 have a large number of optimizations for large screens, including the taskbar, multi-tasking, keyboard and mouse support, and a compatibility mode for applications. We also have exciting updates for guidance, testing and tools. To remove the guesswork from optimizing and testing your large screen application, we’ve created a set of large screen quality guidelines and a number of Material Design Canonical Layouts. Our guidelines are implemented in our Jetpack libraries, which incorporate many of the most common tasks for large screen development, such as drag and drop.
Hardware innovation is a cornerstone of Google’s investment in big screens – this year and beyond. At I / O, we announced the Google Pixel tablet coming in 2023. On top of that, our partners create amazing devices with tablets, Chromebooks and folding devices that come from companies like Samsung, Lenovo and OPPO.
With the incredible hardware and operating system innovations, more applications than ever are optimized for large screens. Apps like Facebook, TikTok, HBO Max and Zoom look good on big screens. Here at Google, we recognize the opportunity with big screens. Apps like YouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, Chrome and many of our most popular applications are performing big screen optimizations, with more to come.
These apps – and more – are available in the Play Store, where we’ve made some of our most impactful updates to date. We are committed to helping users find the best big-screen-optimized applications in the Play Store with new big-screen-focused editorial content and separate reviews and ratings for big-screen applications. On top of that, we update Google Play to look great on a tablet, Chromebook or foldable device.
# 3: We’re here to support you!
To make your apps even better on large screens and Wear OS, we’ve created in-depth content to make your app work better across different types of inputs, screen sizes, and devices.
In Android Studio Dolphin Beta and Electric Eel Canary, we’ve added new features for Wear OS and Large Screens to help you be more productive as you develop and test different form factors. Read more
Do you want to start? Here is all the great I / O content to help you along the way: