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Revisiting Wear OS Development

Revisiting Wear OS Development

9/29/2020

 
I’ll admit, it’s been a while since I released a Wear OS app. However, I’m pleased to say that I am currently working on a new one! In this post, I’ll be talking about why I haven’t worked on a new Wear OS app for a really long time, and what my plan is for this new one.

Why so long?

To be honest, the reason I haven’t ever gotten super into Wear OS development is that I had previously been using Xamarin, which allowed me to write Android apps in C#.

​While Xamarin is really cool, it’s also not the most reliable. After installing updates for it, I will often have to do quite a bit of troubleshooting to get the app I am working on to build and/or get deployed to the emulator or physical device that I’m testing the app on. It’s not always this complicated to use Xamarin, but this sort of thing is quite irritating when I’m on a schedule, so I have been trying to move on from it over the last few months, especially when the app was able to build and deploy just fine before the updates.

Thankfully, I now know enough Kotlin to be able to make Wear OS apps in Android Studio, as Wear OS is just Android for smartwatches. This possibility seemed intriguing, hence why I am revisiting Wear OS development.

What about this new app?

Now that I’ve explained why I’m interested in writing a new Wear OS app, I feel like I should talk about what I plan for it to be.

I won’t go into detail about what exactly this app does, but I can tell you that it’s a handy little tool that adds some neat functionality to your smartwatch. Also, I’m not certain if I plan to charge money for it or not, but I am considering it. Finally, you can expect to see it pretty soon, assuming everything goes as planned.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say for now. I hope you are excited about this new app, as I certainly am!
Edit: This Reddit post explains my frustration pretty well.
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