Chapter 1. Understanding Android Wearables and Building Your First Android Wear App

When Google announced Android Wear at their Google I/O conference back in March 2014, developers were excited and started embracing this technology to see what types of applications they could create to communicate between the Android handheld device and Android wearable, while making our day-to-day lives a lot easier.

Android wearables bring a personal touch by allowing consumers to interact with their devices on a different level, and are aimed at reducing people's interaction with their mobile phones. This could include receiving a simple notification message reminding you to pick up something on your way home from work, or that you have an upcoming appointment. There is even an ability to receive messages from your favorite social networking application, for example, Facebook.

This chapter provides you with a theoretical background of Android, and how to develop applications for the Android Wear platform from Google. This platform allows your Android wearable device to communicate with your phone wirelessly over Bluetooth, and many manufactures like Samsung and LG have embraced this technology and created wearable devices, such as the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch R smartwatches.

In later chapters, we will be working with some of these APIs and seeing how we can incorporate these in our applications to communicate between our Android phone and Android Wear devices.

This chapter includes the following topics:

• Introducing Android wearables
• Understanding the Android Wear architecture
• Building a simple Android wearable application