Google Releases Android Wear 2.0 Developer Preview 2

BY Evan Selleck

Published 12 Jul 2016

Android Wear 2.0

Earlier this year, during its Google I/O conference, the company announced Android Wear 2.0, and then quickly released the first Developer Preview for the software.

Now, Google has released the second Developer Preview, bringing with it new features for developers to try out. The biggest addition for this latest version of the preview is support for wrist gestures. With this, users will be able to not only scroll through their notifications with just a movement of their wrist, but also sift through third-party apps and more.

The new Developer Preview also supports additional APIs, as well as enhancements for the wearable’s drawer options.

Here’s the full changelog:

  • Platform API 24 – We have incremented the Android Platform API version number to 24 to match Nougat. You can now update your Android Wear 2.0 Preview project’s compileSdkVersion to API 24, and we recommend that you also update targetSdkVersion to API 24.
  • Wearable Drawers Enhancements – We launched the wearable drawers as part of the Android Wear 2.0 Preview 1, along with UX guidelines on how to best integrate the navigation drawer and action drawer in your Android Wear app. In Preview 2, we have added additional support for wearable drawer peeking, to make it easier for users to access these drawers as they scroll. Other UI improvements include automatic peek view and navigation drawer closure and showing the first action in WearableActionDrawer’s peek view. For developers that want to make custom wearable drawers, we’ve added peek_view and drawer_content attributes to WearableDrawerView. And finally, navigation drawer contents can now be updated by calling notifyDataSetChanged.
  • Wrist Gestures: Since last year, users have been able to scroll through the notification stream via wrist gestures. We have now opened this system to developers to use within their applications. This helps improve single hand usage, for when your users need their other hand to hold onto their shopping or their kids. See the code sample below to get started with gestures in your app.

For developers, and the folks that just want to try something new, the Developer Preview 2 can be accessed right here.

For everyone else, Google plans on launching Android Wear 2.0 this fall.

[via Android Developers Blog]