Building the first watch app for Android Wear 2.0

I recently had the pleasure to implement Cluj-Napoca Transport on Android Wear 2.0. Android Wear is a version of Google's Android operating system designed for smart watches and other wearables. Google did a big update for the operating system on Feb 2017 and that’s how Android Wear 2.0 was born.

Applications on Android Wear 2.0 are not limited by the paired application and they can have their own business logic and communication with the server. My first step towards implementing the new application was to separate the business logic to a library and use it for both the phone and smart watch application.

Smart watches are not supposed to replace the phone but rather give an easy way to execute important actions. For anything more in depth you can still use the phone. Because of this, only the most important feature was implemented: displaying the bus times.

The hardest part in developing the application was the UI/UX. The UI components provided by Google are straight forward but the real challenge was to do a pleasant and easy to use design for the application. After doing a lot of research on this topic, the current UI/UX was born: 

If you want to try out the application you can find it here.