(upbeat music)
Hello everyone. I'm Bjorn.
Karen and I are going to share what's new for the Wear platform
and the opportunities this extends to developers.
We believe a smartwatch should empower us to live better
by connecting us to the people we care about,
timely information, and our health, all from our wrist.
Over the years,
we’ve partnered with an incredible ecosystem of OEMs and developers
to deliver that experience.
We’ve announced a lot of big updates for Wear at I/O.
We want to share more about what's ahead, where we've made investments,
and how you can build great experiences for wearables.
We're launching major improvements to the core Wear experience
and major changes to the platform,
making the latest version of Wear our biggest platform update ever.
One area where we've invested is making it easier to switch between apps.
Button shortcuts make it easy to access the most common tasks,
like double tapping the side button to switch to your most recent app.
Getting things done with your watch has never been easier.
Tiles provide fast, predictable access
to the information and actions you rely on most.
We’ve also now opened up tiles for developers
to bring the most relevant information from their apps
directly into the carousel.
Next, let's take a look
at how we’re improving the core Google apps on your wrist.
Apps like Google Assistant, Google Maps,
Google Pay, YouTube Music, and now, Fitbit
have been revamped with our new design principles and expanded capabilities.
Here's Google Maps.
Whether biking, walking, or driving,
you'll be able to stay on track with hands-free turn by turn navigation.
Each direction is viewable at a glance on your watch,
letting you stay focused on your next move.
And later this year, you'll be able to leave your phone at home
and continue navigating with the new Google Maps on your wrist.
Another great app is Google Pay, which is optimal for on-the-go moments.
While walking in your neighborhood, there’s no need to carry around your wallet
if you decide to head to a cafe to get a coffee.
And you can even pay hands-free.
Google Pay for Wear will be available in 26 more countries,
and will also have support to pay for transit
in more than 200 major metros.
Now, we'd like to share the new YouTube Music experience on Wear.
It’s the first smartwatch app from YouTube Music
that allows you to download music for offline listening,
even without your phone nearby.
You can enjoy more than 70 million songs
and thousands of playlists tailored to your daily activities
from your morning commute to cardio workouts.
Speaking of fitness,
we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Fitbit to the family of experiences on Wear.
The features that millions of people love and use every day,
like a snapshot of your stats on wrist
so you can easily see your progress throughout the day,
and in the moment celebrations to help keep you motivated to reach your goals
will be available on Wear watches.
We can't wait for you to try it out.
Now, let's talk about what's new for the platform.
The latest version of Wear
has been built with a focus on performance and simplicity,
making it easier for developers to create amazing apps and services.
And this work is being done in deep partnership
with another leader in the wearable space, Samsung.
Samsung has been a pioneer
in developing innovative, consumer-centric experiences,
in partnership with Google for many years.
And this release that we’ve collaborated on for smartwatches is really special.
Consumers will benefit from more innovation and choice of experiences and styles.
You'll see better performance
and availability in more countries and languages.
And for those with cellular watches, there will be more choice in carriers too.
For device partners, we’re opening up the platform.
This empowers them to build watches and a user interface
that matches the style and design of their phones.
And for developers, this means building for the same Android platform
used by consumers all over the world.
With our shared focus on bringing choice to our consumers,
Samsung will also bring their watch face design capabilities
to the Wear ecosystem.
This tool makes the process of designing a watch face simple for designers,
with drag and drop features, easy editing, and more.
It'll be available soon, so stay tuned.
Let's next take a look
at how we have worked together to optimize for performance.
The next generation of Wear smartwatches will be more performant and power efficient
through optimizations to the framework,
key applications, and advances in the latest chip sets.
With these improvements,
the Wear experience will be more responsive and delightful.
Apps start up to 30% faster,
And the animations and transitions are super smooth.
And with that, I’d like to turn it over to Karen
to share with you more about what we have in store for developers.
Hi everyone.
I’m Karen and I’m on the product team for Android and Wear.
Over several years, the Android team has worked hard
to improve the mobile developer experience, bringing Android’s best
to make you as efficient and productive as possible.
Today, I’d like to share how we’ll bring all of that to Wear,
making it easier to develop high quality apps with Jetpack APIs and Kotlin,
upgraded tools with Android Studio,
and improving discovery and distribution for Wear apps
on the Google Play Store.
First, the new Jetpack APIs.
We know on a watch, battery life is key,
and glanceable contextual experiences need to be easy to create.
So you need powerful APIs to help you do this.
Like Jetpack on mobile,
these APIs allow you to follow best practices reduce boilerplate code,
and write code that work consistently across Wear versions and devices.
There are several new APIs for Wear: Tiles, Ongoing Activity,
improvements to watch faces and complications,
handling input and curved text in the beginning of a new health platform.
We’ve also seen how developers love Kotlin,
with over 80% of the top 1000 apps now written in Kotlin.
So we brought that to Wear.
Not only can you use Kotlin with all the new APIs,
but we’re releasing our set of Kotlin-first APIs,
rewritten from the ground up,
like our Watch Faces, Complications and Remote Interaction APIs.
Let’s take a deeper look at the Tiles API.
It enables any developer to create a custom tile
for all the devices in the Wear ecosystem.
Tiles have quickly become one of the most helpful features in Wear.
We’ve seen higher engagement with apps just a swipe away in the tiles carousel.
Earlier this year, we launched an early access program with developers.
The Jetpack tiles libraries is in alpha. Any custom tiles using this library
will be available to users in the coming weeks with the new platform update.
So, what are the parts of a tile?
Tiles have a timeline which enable refresh of UI data in a battery-efficient way.
A timeline consists of at least one timeline entry,
which has a layout that is displayed during a specific time interval.
You can create a tile that shows different UI for different points in time.
For example, if you’re building a calendar app,
the system updates to the right time that specific meeting would be shown.
In our first example,
we’re going to create just one timeline entry and layout
for a simple Hello World tile.
And now let's look at code.
First, extend the TileProviderService() and implement two methods.
onTileRequest, where you define the layout of your tile,
and onResourcesRequests, where you provide the resources for your tile.
Let’s look at a simple implementation of onTileRequest.
So within onTileRequest, the tile builder does most of the work.
And the most important part of building your tile is the timeline.
Let's look at the timeline in more detail.
From the builder, we set one timeline entry, then we set a layout,
and finally, within that layout, we define our simple text, “Hello, World!“
You can add images, animations, and much more to this layout as well.
We also provide a large number of layout containers
for a simpler starting point as you design your tile.
We’ve been working with developers on new tiles for Wear.
Here are a few from Adidas, Sleep Cycle,
Hole 19, Outdooractive, Calm, Flo, and Golf Pad.
We're looking forward to seeing what tiles developers build.
Now let’s look at the Ongoing Activity API.
As Bjorn said, the newest version of Wear makes it easy
to switch back and forth between apps.
This is enabled by the Ongoing Activity API,
which is when an app continues to run in the background, even if the user navigates away.
The new API makes it easy for users to navigate back to your app from other apps
the home screen, and the global launcher.
On the left, you can see a small ongoing activity indicator below the watch face.
The user can click from the watch face to go back into the app.
And on the right, you can see the app launcher,
where ongoing activities are listed on top of recent apps,
making it easy to find the most used apps.
To return to your most recent app, simply double press on the crown button.
The Ongoing Activity API is now in alpha.
Let's look at some code.
With your existing notifications, attach an ongoing activity.
You want to set ongoingActivity to true in your notification.
This means there’s a background task happening,
like playing music or downloading a file.
Now create an ongoingActivity, set a notification ID,
the icon that you want to display in the activity indicator,
and then add any status.
Now apply the context.
The ongoing activity will be tied to the ongoing notification
through the notification ID that you set earlier.
That's it.
To update status,
call the update method on the ongoing activity.
Today, we are announcing the beginning of a health and fitness platform for Android.
Our health services platform enables developers to create high quality,
powerful fitness and health experiences for wearables,
with a simpler developer experience.
Created in collaboration with Samsung, the platform provides fitness and health data
generated from sensors, contextually Wear algorithms,
and all day health monitoring.
With the health services platform,
data collection and metrics computation is streamlined and consistent.
So you can get accurate heart rate to calories
to daily distance from one trusted source.
One of the biggest challenges managing your own sensor data
was knowing when to stop work so the battery doesn't drain.
The platform handles the work to manage your hardware and sensors for you,
meaning better battery life.
The alpha of this health services platform is available today.
We’re continuing to build on this new platform,
so you’ll see things like access to exercise history coming in the future.
Okay. So those are some of the new APIs.
I’ll talk about some of the tools we’re building in Android Studio.
To get started quickly,
you can use Android Studio to create a new wearable project.
We’ve also made it much simpler
to pair Wear emulators with your phone directly from Android Studio.
So you can stay in the IDE to develop, test and iterate.
The emulator is an essential part of the toolkit when developing for Wear.
You can test apps on the new version of Wear without a device with improved reliability.
The emulator now also has a virtual heart rate sensor,
which means you can create apps that respond differently to different activity levels.
We know that engagement in discovering an app is an important part of the experience.
We’re making it easier to find great app experiences on the watch,
as well as find Wear apps from your phone.
With the latest updates coming to Google Play,
users will soon be able to use search to easily find apps for the watch,
look at the Wear category for app recommendations,
and install apps to their watch directly from the mobile Play Store.
The Wear app ecosystem is growing. We're working with a number of developers
to bring richer, more immersive app experiences to the platform
like Strava, Adidas, Golf Pad,
Flo, Spotify, Swim.com, Seven, Cardiogram,
Hole 19, C25K, Ski Tracks, Calm and Sleep Cycle.
We’d love to give you a preview
of what two of our app partners have been building.
Rebuilt from the ground up,
Spotify has created a best-in-class standalone app for Wear,
designed to empower users to take the Spotify experience with them throughout their day.
You can now head out for a workout, leave your phone at home,
simply download your playlist for offline playback,
connect your wireless earbuds, and head out the door.
When you get home, reopen the app,
select one of your local speakers, and keep listening.
It's that seamless.
We know your watch helps you stay motivated about your activity throughout the day.
A Bitmoji Watchface uses contacts & activity signals to show your personal Bitmoji
reacting to fitness data changing throughout the day.
I'm working hard right now.
You can install it from the Featured Watch Faces section
on Google Play for Wear later this year.
For resources to get started for building for Wear,
go to developer.android.com/wear.
Thank you for joining us today to hear about what we’ve been up to.
We're excited for a new era in wearables.
You can also join us for other I/O activities like I/O adventure,
at our code labs on ongoing activities and tiles.
Thanks.
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