Posted by Ksenia ShumelchykRelationship engineer for Android developers
Working with our hardware partners, we have continued to prioritize the Wear operating system based on Google user experience. That's why we made fundamental design changes to the platform and significantly expanded the capabilities of the Wear OS hybrid interface, improving two key areas: power and performance.
Of OnePlus Watch 2powered by the latest version of Wear OS (Wear operating system 4), the dual-chipset architecture works together with our hybrid interface to make both chips work better together. This allows even more usage scenarios to benefit from dramatically longer battery life, up to 100 hours with regular use, with all functionality accessible in Smart Mode.
Together we created a premium smartwatch experience that doesn't compromise on advanced features or battery life. In this post, we'll show you how to take advantage of these changes when building experiences for Wear OS.
On the edge of innovation: redesigned smartwatch architecture
Wear OS smartwatches have a dual-chipset architecture, including a high-performance application processor (AP) and an ultra-low power co-processor microcontroller unit (MCU). The architecture has a powerful AP that can handle complex operations en masse, and is seamlessly linked to a low-power MCU.
The Wear OS hybrid interface enables intelligent switching between the MCU and the AP, allowing the AP to be suspended when not needed to extend battery life. For example, it helps achieve more energy efficient experiences, such as processing sensor data on the MCU while the AP sleeps. At the same time, the hybrid interface ensures a seamless transition between these states, maintaining a rich and premium user experience without jarring transitions between power modes.
Connectivity and notification experience
To improve connectivity-dependent interactions such as notifications and phone calls, OnePlus leveraged platform capabilities with the Notification API in the hybrid interface, allowing the MCU to handle regular notification experiences and reducing the need to activate the AP.
For example, bypassed notifications is delivered to the watch without activating the high-quality AP. Users can read and ignore these notifications while the watch is still powered by the MCU. The MCU can also incorporate wearable-specific actions into notifications, such as quick replies or remote actions.
What this means for development
You can use existing Wear OS APIs to get these optimizations with no additional effort – no code changes required!
notifications
The hybrid notification interface enables seamless transitions between power modes to work with the Wear OS notification stack. You will get the best notification performance by using the Notification API.
Health and fitness experiences
The Wear OS hybrid interface also enhances the fitness experience with more accurate exercise tracking, automatic exercise recognition and smarter health data monitoring. All these can be offered to users without compromising battery life.
Starting from Wear OS 3, developers use Health services on Wear OS to access sensor data. The hybrid health interface works under the hood to enable power optimizations by batching sensor data on the MCU and periodically updating developer apps through the Health Services API on the AP.
Look at faces
With Wear OS 4 we have the Look at face sizea declarative XML format to create customizable and energy-efficient watch faces.
The platform has created capabilities to implement Watch Face Format rendering on the MCU, so using the new format will help future-proof certain watch faces to take advantage of emerging optimizations in future devices for better battery usage.
look at the dial size documentation and design guidelines for Wear OS watch faces.
Extend your reach with Wear OS
With the additions to the Wear OS smartwatch ecosystem and expanded device capabilities, now is an ideal time to build experiences for smartwatches that can reach more users and benefit your business.
To get started developing apps for Wear OS, try our Compose for Wear OS codelaband view the documentation And samples.
Read more about developer updates in Wear OS 4and how to get your apps ready for the latest Wear OS watches.
We can't wait to see what experiences you will build!