Last week we shipped Blue Colony to Google Play. It’s a tiny, intuitive app store for Android Wear apps, built to run on a smartwatch.

This post summarizes the experiences we had during the development process of Blue Colony; hopefully relevant to fellow Android Wear developers, or anybody silly enough to tie a mini computer to their wrist.

Why did we do this?

We love gadgets and love exploring everything new — but when my LG G Watch R finally arrived from the UK, it drove me crazy. It was virtually impossible to find smartwatch apps on Google Play.

The discovery of Wear Store for Android Wear by GoKo gave us first relief. GoKO made an awesome smartphone app to browse and find apps for the smartwatch. Wear HQ and Android Wear Center are also really helpful!

But this couldn’t be the final step in evolution: We were looking for a full smartwatch experience: A minimalistic, intuitive place to discover relevant apps for our new gadgets.

Who’s onboard?

Stefano developes Android apps since the very first Android phone was shipped to Pisa, Italy.

Philippe is new to the mobile business but sometimes has a good idea, he is eager to bring to life.

And of course special thanks to our great team of supporters in mobile development and design!

From idea to prototype in 1.5 weeks

There are tons of requirements and guidelines how to build an app for wearables — we didn’t look at them.

Instead we concentrated on the constraints brought to us by the limited real estate of a smartwatch screen and on how we figured a watch app store should feel and behave.

You’ll find a comprehensive list of design guidelines by Android Wear here ——-> https://developer.android.com/design/wear/index.html

For Blue Colony we stuck to two navigation principles:

The basic list-structure for the overview of categories(! few and large touch targets)

2. The vertical-then-horizontal list-structure for the app-profiles in the categories (! keep cards simple)

For the actual app profiles we took a good look at a classic app profile in Google Play on the smartphone and stripped it down to the bones. We noticed that showing screenshots from actual smartwatch apps on your smartwatch triggered much more downloads then long discriptions, no one actually reads.

We used Balsamiq (http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/) to wireframe Blue Colony and map out all necessary interactions. Balsamiq is an extremely intuitive and basic tool, which helped us cunstructing our app in no time at all. This is our mock: