Google and LG have not yet released the LG Urbane 2 LTE, but it’s definitely out in the US and it’s the first Android Wear watch running Marshmallow. With an Android Wear device running Android 6.0, there’s also a need for developers to start updating their apps to API 23 with the new SDK in preparation for an OTA update coming to other Android Wear devices ‘in the coming months’.
The Android Wear SDK for API 23, comes with new emulators as well as the SDK, and has support for runtime permission checks, -round resource qualifiers, and audio. That -round/-notround resource qualifiers are very important in a world of both square and round devices, with some not quite right cards popping up on watches. The qualifier can stop this happening as you can see in this graphic:
Audio support is a big one for developers in preparation for the coming OTA. The update will finally activate, and make use of the as yet unacknowledged speaker in the Huawei Watch, Zenwatch 2 and presumably ones in the LG Urbane 2 LTE and Moto 360 Gen 2 as well.
With the launch of the Tag Heuer Connected Watch, support for Intel X86 chipsets will now be included though developers using the NDK rather than Java, though additional libraries will have to be included in Wear APKs.
The Emulator and SDK are apparently now available for developers, so if you’re on that side of the fence, make sure you’re up to date. News of the rollout schedule will be announced on the Android Wear Developers Google+ community when Google is ready to share.
