Android Wear 2.0 has been delayed, we all know that. In keeping with Google’s plan to have releases go as seamlessly and break as fewer apps as possible they release developer previews of the OS along the way. Today they have released Developer Preview 4 for Android Wear 2.0 bringing with it some cool new features.
According to the Android Developers Blogspot, Developer Preview 4 introduces some new APIs to help developers build standalone apps.
There are new APIs for OAuth that make it very simple to authenticate using Google Sign-In. This allows for seamless and faster authentication which can hopefully be introduced to some cool new apps.
There is now In-App billing for Android Wear apps allowing users to purchase from their watch with a simple 4-digit Google Account PIN. This makes it easier for developers to monetise their apps as if you had to go into a phone to do it many users would skip it.
Google removed swipe to dismiss in earlier versions of Android Wear 2.0 and after what I would say was extensive criticism of this they has brought it back. Power to the people. To bring this back some APIs have changed including the hardware button now maps to “power” instead of “back” which unfortunately means that the hardware button can no longer be intercepted by apps.
In what you would think is and should be a given, support for Android Wear 1.0 apps has been added (no wonder many people hated the first releases of Android Wear 2.0).
There are a few other minor things but with these things only just now being added to Android Wear 2.0 I suspect we may still be a fair way off an official release. If you would like to check it out for yourself head on over to the Android Wear Preview website and follow the instructions. You can also follow progress of bugs etc at the Android Wear Developers community.
Does anyone have this installed on their watch? How stable it is? Let us know in the comments below.
I wish it was easier to install (like the Android preview OTAs). The one downside to using a Chromebook as my daily (only) driver is no ADB/Fastboot support.
Yes, I know I can run up Crouton and use these tools in there, but I prefer keeping it as vanilla as possible (oh, the irony is not lost on me).
I read somewhere the other day that the dev channel of chromeos allows fastboot etc thru some extension…
https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/5hywoe/why_isnt_android_debugging_bridge_available_on/
Yep, I’d seen that extension for ADB a while ago (but had forgotten about it), but without fastboot as well, it’s not possible to flash the ROM (though I defer to your expertness in that department if I’m wrong there).
I found DP2 too unstable but I really liked the changes. I would also like to know if people have found this stable enough as a daily driver…