551Chapter 15
Developing for Android
Wearable Devices
This chapter looks at how to develop applications for Android wearable devices, which at the time
of the writing of this book, is primarily dominated by the smartwatch product vertical. This market
will eventually include smartglasses as well as other wearable devices, once the pricing of these
smartglasses products becomes reasonable. Currently, smartglasses cost thousands of dollars!
This chapter covers the different types of wearables, the different manufacturer approaches to
creating wearable products, and the different ways to develop for wearable devices that run Android.
It is also important to note that there are other wearable OSs, so you will also encounter wearable
products that run HTML5-based OSs such as Tizen OS. An example of a Tizen smartwatch is
Samsung’s Galaxy Gear 2. The Galaxy Gear 1 uses Android OS as its development platform, and a
majority of the smartwatch products out there currently use Android 4.x as their core OS as well.
This chapter begins with a high-level overview of exactly what an Android wearable is. It explains
what True Android wearable versus Android wearable peripherals means, the Android application
development considerations for wearable products, how to optimize your Android application for
the wearable environment, and the different kinds of Android wearable APIs, including the “normal”
Android API, Android Wear SDK, and custom wearable SDK add-ons for wearables.
After that, you will create an absolute.beginners.EarthTime package and EarthTime application
using the New ➤ Android Application series of dialogs, which will add the “planet” theme to your
galaxy applications. Since you are allowed to use imagery from the NASA website for educational
purposes, you will make a custom Earth smartwatch face for the popular Neptune Pine smartwatch.
That smartwatch product does not require you to install the Wear SDK, or add any SDK add-ons,
into your existing Android SDK installation. This way, you can simply continue using the Eclipse ADT
installation that you have been using all along to develop your Neptune Pine smartwatch app.
You will be installing the Wear SDK in Chapter 16, however, as it became available as I was writing
that chapter on Android 5.0.