Exciting Possibilities with Android Wear

This week, Google unveiled Android Wear and made its first official move into the smartphone market.

Up until now, smartwatches have focused solely on delivering short notifications. Yet what’s been missing is the ability to quickly act on that information by saving or sharing it.

Android Wear changes this. Yes, it’s still designed for delivering quick snippets of information – things like Google Now notifications, tweets, news alerts, emails, and to-do lists. But it is also designed for glancing at important information and taking action, for example, letting you save content to Pocket without pulling out your phone.

Add “Save to Pocket” to Your Wear App with Our SDK

Imagine your friend sends you an interesting article. Your Android Wear smartwatch gets an alert and you think, “Hmm, I’d really love to read that on my commute later.” You swipe, and an action pops up to save to Pocket. In a single tap, the article immediately becomes accessible in your list for whenever you have the time to go back and read it.

We whipped up a quick prototype to show just how easy any app can add quick sharing support like Pocket. You can try the code that makes this possible in Github.



Work in Progress

Given that Android Wear’s SDK is still in Developer Preview and was only recently released, this should be considered a work in progress. Be sure to understand and follow Android’s UI guidelines for wearables. We will be updating things as the Developer Preview continues to take shape. Please let us know if you have any feedback or requests.

Max Weiner is Pocket’s Android Development lead and tweets at @XxXxXxXxXxam.