Monday, October 9, 2017
Android Wear... Sort of
What it should be.
My Pebble round lasted 1.5 years. The replacement 3 months. Now I'm using a Pebble Time, which is working great, but for how long?
Saw a good price on the Moto 360, so I ordered one. Turns out I was early to the party. Waited around a month for the 2.0 update to finally show up. 2.0 being important since that allows watch to bluetooth device communication, and not just a phone.
Programming this thing is impossible. The connection between Android Studio and the Watch is sketchy at best. You have to connect from the Terminal using something like "adb connect 192.xxx.xxx.xxx". But allot of the time, it won't connect. Sometimes it seems like maybe it's the watch has gone to sleep. Other times, you toggle wifi on the watch and then the connect will work. Who knows. Buggy. I had one magical day where it sat in the charger and worked flawlessly. Today, I might get the APK deployed, but then the watch disconnects, so no debug.
I was very surprised when I switched to a Kindle tablet. Infinitely easier. The device just shows up when you click run, imagine that.
Oh, and bluetooth. I have it working, but after reinstalling the app on the watch, I'm getting messages that I need to grant access to bluetooth. You have to do this multiple places.
1. In the manifest
2. After the program is deployed, there's a permissions section
3. And it appears, you need to answer the dialogs asking for access to bluetooth as well.
There's the rub. This is running as a complication, there's nowhere to pop-up a dialog, so you are dead in the water, stupid. You can see the issues "they" are having with security on Android.
At the moment I'm not sure how I had bluetooth working, and since I can't get a reliable debug(today)... I know some of my tests I had a basic watchface, then I loaded the complication, and it all worked. Thinking I got lucky, and the authorization I provided for one app bled over to another.
Going to implement this on the kindle first, just to work out the coding issues and then keep my fingers crossed that I can get something to work on the watch.
On the plus side, Apple announced that their watch will soon communicate directly with the G5, at least the manufacturers are getting the message that people don't want to be tied to a phone. I may get an iWatch, as soon as that update hits, probably better long term possibilities there, sounds(and looks) like Android Wear is DOA.
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